On the interstate Charlene was just a rebel
Wrong as long as you're the one carrying a badge
In the aftermath of that sky blue El Camino
When she took one hell but it didn't hurt too bad
Now a polarized consensus leaves a girl without her senses
The aftermath was thus as much as but
She fought for what
Just to make it clear Charlene's Remote Control
You could see this swerve like a heel turn telegraphed
If you didn't know the scent of burnt rubella
Has a healing cypher and a myth just do the math
chorus
in the place where the bison thunders echo
lead that fuel gas her up and get go oh no
So the time space loop in the multiverse of stoners
Making stories up so the moon becomes the sun
Here's a reprobate sexier than Cleopatra
Let her fill your lungs up and smoke that son-a-gun
chorus
Dave and Dennis speak on Dennis's movie CATONSVILLE: MUSIC CITY MARYLAND, a Sunrider 9 Production.
Nowhere Ones Essay 5 September 2019
This is convoluted, but then again so is everything. Fuck. Here is an immediate existential digression. Follow it? Why the fuck not. Maybe go stream of consciousness. That always feels like a cop out. Who fucking knows. The thing with stream of consciousness is that it's the amalgamation of everything one's little pea brain is sorting through. Just because the words come tumbling out doesn't imply a lack of preparation. That's the biggest thing that pisses me off about motherfuckers who can't grasp the complexities of improvisation. Improvisation is the exact OPPOSITE of lack of preparation. It's living one's life constantly in the state of immediate creation. It's just that when improvising the artists shines the artist's spotlight on the shit purging itself from the soul of the vessel-artist. Then again artist as vessel is another hoary cliche. Anything that smacks of "otherness" is annoying. Like there are different "things." Things? Really? Is there ONE thing. Is one infinite. Of course it is, dildo head.
As for the Nowhere Ones it's all there. It all fits. I always think of the movie YELLOW SUBMARINE where the psychedelic words spell out "nowhere" then they desperate into "now here." It's there. It's here.
Initially this song was called "Nowhere Son" and it kicked off A BRIDE A DAY, the cassette I did between Forgotten Sons and Tude and Doom Cookie. It served as a reset there and it serves as a reset here. A lot of these initial bits are from that period, riffs wise, probably because Andy is drumming and he drummed Love & Hate and Forgotten Sons. It's amazing how much I have stayed on point in terms of large lyrical concepts.
Anyhoo, the story continues. This is concurrent with 1993. There the mundanity of existence bumps up against the harsh realities of young adults finding out that fucking up has consequences. Here though? Pure fantasy, baby, and yes I say "baby" too. It's not that there are no consequences in THE SAGA OF REMOTE CONTROL as much as it's an attempt to apply improvisational techniques to long form storytelling and seeing where the story goes. There is an outline of 30 something records for THE SAGA OF REMOTE CONTROL. That's the backdrop. That's the fabric of existence. That's the land upon which we stand as we set forth into by the minute story telling recreated in a studio and brought to YOU, you brilliant motherfucker.
I have to give all due props to Matt Besser and his podcast IMPROV4HUMANS. They make it up, duh, with even less preparation than my absolute holy grail of improv podcasts Scott Aukerman's motherfucking brilliant COMEDY BAND BANG. I bring up Besser, though, because I consider him a peer simply in that we're the same age and grew up punk as fuck. Of course he fulfilled his artistic dreams and I'm still slogging through. When he has on musical guests, mostly alt-country (natch), he asks what a certain lyric meant. I imagine he's asking me about a certain lyric from, say, Meltdown Shuffle from ACT 9 ATLANTIS and replying along the lines of "I'm really not sure what it means. It was just improvised in the larger story, like when you guys make shit up. Later you can go back and figure it out. In the moment it was stream of consciousness - in so much that every thought is stream of consciousness." I've quoted it a million times because it's perfection: "turn off your minds relax and float downstream."
"Nowhere Ones" is an attempt to bring lonesomeness into a universal realm, to try to include all the people who feel out of focus and invite them all to the party. To me that was always the great promise of rock and roll. Everyone is invited and everyone is accepted. That's pretty much a good way to approach existence. At any rate, friend, 7.
Fifty damn years on down the road
I was driving late at night
Under pollution lights
But it didn't stop the sun from coming up
To interrupt
Everything I seen
And everyone I known
My young self stumbled by
Too drunk too wonder why
Ain't no stars in the sky for the nowhere ones
That never won
Beat you black and blue
Bleed a drop or two
I see it in my sights
I glimpse it in the night
I don't know what is right for the nowhere ones
That never won
We're the nowhere ones
That just begun
00 Otis Redding
05 It's the science fiction western.
10 If there's ten songs he put a shaker on nine of them.
15 ...And he played in the Sprouts?
20 Paul bought it.
25 That was for six!
30 It just doesn't feel right.
35 Nothing is to be dismissed.
40 It might not be my chair.
45 You have some riffs.
50 I smoked pot at the first Circle 9 practice.
55 They were surfing in Tahiti.
60 He...he...he...he....
Peace and love, motherfucker and you know this yeah
Peace and love with a ruckus and you know this
Yeah yeah yeah
It's got to happen because it's right
In every feature in every sight
Drawing a bead on for loving's sake
Peace ain't a funeral love ain't a wake
From where I'm singing direct to you
I want it bad you want it too
I want it from you give it to me
'Cause peace and love that shit is free
So I walk down to the bar I saw some cover band with used guitars
And a heart made out of gold that's already been sold
From town Manila to Katmandu
Cantankeronus I got that too
Give me your loving you got that right
'Cause peace and love that shit is tight
Stoner Wintertime Essay 17 June 2019
The essay for the song before this, the "Fireplace Memories Essay," barely dealt with the song. It's hard to be so emotionally bare in a format in which you haven't spent your entire life dicking around. Suffice to say I can sing about my dad but I sure as fuck can't write or talk about him. But THIS essay, why this one may be TOO song specific.
Or maybe it will have nothing to do with the song at all. Part of the joy in being creative in a format that you made the fuck up is that you, the royal "you," are free to leap into flights of fancy. How much irrelavent tripe is too much? Tell you what, I'm not sure that relevance itself is relevant. Every once in a while I don't know what to do. But that's a lyric in a song called "Sinkin" to be dropped sometime when it's cold, most likely.
"Stoner Wintertime?" The band was having trouble with the time signaure changes so we changed it. I kept the original version I used on the demo and started the record with it because one of the main points made in the larger piece is that the categorization of music is beyond arbitrary bordering on insulting. Everyone on Earth should be angered. Everyone on Earth should also crave truth and freedom. NEITHER of those things are happening.
This is a moment in time, essentially, in a quantum amount of ways. In ways that I can percieve it's the wrapping up of the SFProject I undertook because Brian didn't want to do 1993. It's a little weird, right? I love playing with Brian and Wil but it's better for each of them if they aren't in the same band, at least to mine eyes. The major plus up in this bitch is that I've worked withPaul now for for 1 3/4 years. I LOVE the way WINTER 1993 turned out. I'm ecstatic. I ain't going to go into the ins and outs that go into putting together a record. Suffice to say that, as a fella who LOVES writing, I'm blessed (in a way that pays no allegience to the fictional characters known today as "deity') to have pockets of likeminded friends, up for experimentation. At the last SoSHEDity Fringe Players practice ole Pork was talking about the TV show Classic Albums, the one about WHO'S NEXT, and how nobody understood Pete Townsend's concept at all! Laughingly he said that reminded him of me. And of course it does! I can see it but I'm rightly convinced I'm the only one. There are parrallels in pop culture, mainly insanely ambitious and financially nation-sized ones like MVU and GoT. You see? I got the three letter thing down, motherfuckers - SFP!
My brain's scattershot right now. My motherfucking sinuses are causing me a great deal of "goddammit." It drains the energy of the human body. All my extra juice is used fighting the inflamation. Healthy living remedies it to a certain extent. I irrigate the fuckers, I take OTC drugs, I run, do yoga, do body resistence. Every once in a while my sinus laughs at me. If I was a dumdum human living a hundred thousand years ago trying to make sense of this I'd ascribe all sorts of idiotic rememdies to something I couldn't understand. That's what people have done through-out the ages. Even as recently as 5,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, or maybe even 700CE or such. Do you see where I'm going? If you do you're a brilliant cynical motherfucker who is out of sorts with todays backwards looking society based on fear and paranoia. And while fear and paranoia do, in fact, "rule" as they say, pleae burst free from the chains of monotheism, thinker, and embrace LAST century!
The cold and ragged beauty of a winter tree
Struck Dawn as quite odd as she looked to see
A table full of papers but none up to date
No chance t glimpse beauty when you're running late
A far off police siren pierces through the air
But Billy doesn't notice and he doesn't care
Sirens don't mean nothing in the county jail
Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail
In wintertime
The sun don't climb
The ice it shines
The world's unkind
An accident just happened out on National Pike
Some lady ran a redlight sliding through the ice
Valentines day candy scattered on the street
Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet
The windows creek and moan as the wind bears down
Whipping through a tree branch lying on the ground
The screen door whistles loudly and the yard is froze
And me I write a song and I can't feel my toes
chorus
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass and production
Pork - drums and headphones mix
Ian - mastering
Fireplace Memories Essay 10 June 2019
Fireplace Memories Essay 10 June 2019
This here is a straight up song written to my dad. You see, my method of songwriting hues closely to the template laid down by John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows" namely: "turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream." Later on I realized that people of all stripes and sizes use this philosophy in everything. It's what Mike Tyson meant when he said "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." It's what Tom Hank's character meant in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN when he said to a scared soldier "remember your training. You'll be fine." It's a basic root of improvisation's "yes and" tenant as espoused by the UCB trailblazers. Basically it's when one gets in touch with one's subconcious self. Writers talk about it. Athletes talk about it. That makes me wonder if it's specific to "performance."
I don't believe I've ever read anything about a scientist claiming that their hands were moved by some unknowable force when they were hammering some hypothesis into a theory. Some people may say that that is what's wrong with science in the first place. How much does deduction and reasoning factor into the subconcious creativity of an aspiring artist? I would hazard to guess, as the fucking US president would day, very muchly.
The thing about accessing some sort of non-concious realm is that it's unverifyable by any means of science. But is that true? The study of brains, especially as it pertains to psychedelic drugs, has recently been fascinating. I happen upon article after article of MRI scans of brains under the influence of substances that change perspective. Every one shows areas of the brain pumping away that lay dormant in brains being un-fucked with.
In a way everything we learn is tethered to this particular existence. I get a sensation in dreams when I know I gotta wake up. In a semi lucid dream state I reassure myself that I have plenty of time to sleep. Then I ask myself how I know. I say because I'm looking at this clock. Then I say to myself but this clock only exists in this dream state and the state to which we have to wake up is a different one and this clock is meaningless in that world. At this point I usually wake up.
But that's the larger point. Lunatics who believe the earth is flat (fucking idiots - thanks Russia!) exist on the same plane as Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Graham Hancock. Ultimately everything we know and learn is just an interpretation of the limited amount of raw materials we are provided in this waking existence. The importance or rightness of any idea is subjagated to the whims of modern society.
Take the element of gold. It's a high value item. It would not be a high value item if the human race didn't exist. It is purely through the existence of homo sapiens that the basic element of gold is more valuable than salt - or nitrogen, if we keep it elemental. Likewise the retort when I claim the ultimate meaninglessness of the human race. But without us there would be no conciousness. I reply "why?" Surely something created by a lump of carbon that acts as cancer to it's environment could not be the entire reason for everything that came before it. Or could it? It doesn't matter. We're describing the same color using defferent terminology.
From what I've seen by existentialist writing they try to hammer away at this diamond wall of impenetrability. I suppose that the bottom line is that there is no question unworthy of being asked. There is no answer that is substantially blasphemous. It's irritating and exhilerating, much like the writing of these essays is turning out to be. I used to have this problem in college. My hands can't keep up with my brain. I assume that's why I gravitated to playing the guitar. It's more efficient when relaying ideas.
Let it wash over you, music. Sometimes it burrows into your soul.
The books are kept impeccably
An air of sadness from what couldn't be
And pictures grace the mantle place
All rosy cheeked and freckle faced
Separated tender rage
She got the kids you got the cage
Kids move out a big old house of fireplace memories
Alright
Now don't no kids mess up the floor
A townhouse, baby, no back door
The bank is stuffed forever more
And the bills rise like the tides
It wasn't nothing that you said
You thought you loved her in your head
In your mind together dead
Your graves are side by said
So hold on to your fireplace memories
All that you got left can't laugh at you
And that's the truth 'cause what was true
Was what was wrong and now it's gone
Satisfaction never comes but your standards are too high
And when your gone I'll be right there until your soul floats by
And then is lightening strikes you down and crushes all the past
Fireplace memories won't die of all things they will last
chorus
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass, production
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
Empty Glass Essay 5/25/2019
One thing I bought hook, line, and sinker through the nonstop diet of rock and roll literature I ingested through my formative years was the myth that getting fucked up helped the young artist become great. I remember John Lennon saying, in LENNON REMEMBERS, that substances had no effect on his artistic output with a quip along the lines of "I would have written 'I Am the Walrus' if I was on acid or under water."
Of course that isn't the Lennon "Walrus" quote that stuck with me. He also said that he wrote "I Am the Walrus" by eating acid one weekend and writing a verse or line, then eating acid the next weekend and writing another verse or line, rinse and repeat until you make it to "goo-goo-ga-joob."
I bring this up because I truly believed that chemical dependency was a prerequisite for rock and roll. I was a little stoner kid but, really, BEER! Nothing special about it. We were the type of kids who would play "hey mister" outside of the liquor store and go into the woods and get drunk and tell stories. This happened all the way through my teenage years. I gew up in Baltimore. While Minor Threat and Bad Brains were playing the 9:30 Club me and my guys were in the woods slamming warm Schaffer, smoking pot riddled with seeds and stems in corncobs we would purchase at the Royal Farm on Edmondson Avenue right inside the beltway, daring each other to piss on tombstones, playing drinking games that always had to do with rock and roll trivia, mainly the Beatles. The first song I wrote that I had the guts to play and sing was called "I Hope It's You and Me" and it was intended as my version of "If Only You Were Lonely", the B-side to "I Will Dare" by the Replacements. The hook was the line "I might drink myself to an early grave" so when anyone wanted to hear it they would yell "DRINK MYSELF TO AN EARLY GRAVE!" which is a great prank in and of itself.
I continued to write drinking songs for THE REST OF MY FUCKING LIFE! Whenever we do a slow number in C-major even now Brian refers to it as "a drunken swagger." My friends, "Empty Glass"is a song in that grand tradition. It has that garagey mid-atlantic thing going on. Pork says it "sounds like a New Jersey bar band." The mid-atlantic is a strange place. The suburbs are much more urban than to the west, where designers and planners wisely ditched crap that sucks. It's on old and aching suburbia. It's a pre strip mall suburbia. It has main streets, sidewalks, and little stores. It has pizza shops. This ain't the city, but it also isn't the suburbs as they are presently constituated. The houses are close together, the streets are narrow, the corners have what used to be barber shops or liquor stores. One block towards the city and you got the row homes made famous on Baltimore's keynote addition to American pop culter - THE WIRE, and one block the other way and you got mansions. Not MCmansions but real old time structures that slave owners once called home. In the working class sections of these little hamlets a couple blocks off of a road that at one time was a railroad track, you got yourself garages and basements - the petri dish for 70's and 80's little pothead rock and rollers.
These houses were big enough that, when the kids grew up, there was a small space that parents ceded to their offspring. This is what Lee Gardner referred to as, in his review of Circle 9's IF IT WAS UP YOUR ASS YOU'D KNOW IT, "rec-room genius." Another writer for an underground metal mag called Circle 9 "stoner friendly rock guys who have probably played their fair share of keggers." I don't know what's wrapped me up in this sepia toned nostalgic reverie. This is the milieau in which 1993 takes place, when these punk ass little fuckfaces have turned into young adults and the cushion of fuck up is gone. This is when people start to get lost to drugs and prison. That's the backdrop. Cocaine and PCP, two of the shittier drugs.
But "Empty Glass" itself was my attemp at writing something that would fit in on, if not PLEASED TO MEET ME, then HOOTENANNY. It's got the Stonesy Chuck Berry chugga chuggas and the suspended majors that Paul Westerberg uses so expertly. I even took words directly from Paul Westerberg interviews and made them lyrics. He was and remains the master of devestating couplets, either as insults or come ons or "generational longing" type stuff. Nowadays the lyrics in "Empty Glass" to me have the cadence of a sitcom. Set up - punchline. Exposition, set up - punchline - et cetera.
Thinking hard about this song it feels like a nice addition to the canon of boozy little pop songs written by guys and girls who aren't quite urban or suburban but somewhere in between. It's like ole Porky said when the song was coming together in the shed (the more things change!)and previously mentined in this essay. New Jersey Bar Band Rock.
I didn't see you when I went out tonight
A word or two means nothing to me that don't sound right
I live the life of an empty glass
I'm glued onto my barstool before the moment's passed
If you call the weather I'll call the time
If you say you'll be mine
Tonight I'm feeling lucky so what's the word from you
If I run out of cash before the night is through
If I told you my dream you'd slap me in the face
So ditch that creep and I'll meet you later It's gotta be the case
If you call my number then I'll set the time
If you say you'll be you say you'll be mine
If I can wake up to you my life would be complete
But I compete on a footing unsure
When I call your number
You set the time
If ever you are ever you are
If ever you'll be mine mine all mine
You'll be mine
Happy New Years Baby Essay 13 May 2019
This one is about as literal as any song I've ever written. I met my wife at a place in C-ville called "the mansion." She was a student at the college and I was a college drop out living at my Mom's. A couple blocks away from my mom's the edifice stood, a big ol' victorian structure sectioned off into apartments full of young people, or older folk looking for a new start, or drifters living out an endless Jack Kerouac novel, or something much less romantic like people who refuse to or just couldn't get their shit together.
This particular party was sometime in the 90's. Hmm, let's say 1993 (chuckle)? (If anyone is so inclined the mansion is in the Circle 9 movie THE CRACKER GETS THE CHEESE where Joe Gallagher plays a drug dealer, I play a cop, and the late Tom Wind plays a drug purchaser.) On the first floor is a big hall with a stair case opposite the main entrance and big apartments on either side. Facing the stairs, this party took place in the apartment to the right. THAT was where my future wife lived. One time I put my head through the drywall in the closet in her bedroom.
The thing about these parties is that Baltimore is a pretty gritty town - almost literally. When I was growing up you had preps and grits. Later on you had punkers too. But "grit" was a term to describe people who were southern rock devotees. They wore Molly Hatchet baseball shirts, jeans, and workboots year round, even in July. Once a grit jumped off of the high dive in full uniform at a teen night at the pool and everybody cheered. The preps kind of morphed into punks at a certain point. The thing that brought everyone together was a common love of cannabis. So at a pretty young age everybody was mixing together REM and Black Sabbath and MDC and Lynryd Skynyrd. Jump forwards a decade or so and these are the folks populating the party at the Mansion; students, workers, hangers ons, musicians, folks who weren't scared off of drugs simply due to illegality. Back then, during cannabis prohibition, a line of thought went "well I might as well try PCP or crack because they fucking lie about pot!"
Personally I gave up anything illegal when I turned 21 and I set on turning my liver into pate and my lungs into a burnt husk. Eventually I grew to view those addicted to alcohol and nicotene with scorn simply bcause they are the drugs sanctioned by society and therefore the laziest paths to addiction. That's a pretty assholish stance to take. It reminds me of gas stations/convenience stores. They function as one stop addiction shops for bloated and distracted Americans addicted to gasoline, nicotene, high fructose corn syrup, and gambling.
There's always a contingent in alcoholic circles of folks who fancy themselves as great artists or writers living out the romantic lifestyle of Charles Bukowski or Vincent Van Gogh. The truth is we were all just a bunch of drunks. I understand why alcohol came to prominance oh so many years ago. Simply put you needed the alcohol in your liquids to kill lethal bacterias. I oft wonder what American society would be like if the sanctioned drugs were cannabis and psylocibin instead of alcohol, nicotene, sugar, and caffiene. It sure as fuck wouldn't be nearly as fucking violent or mean.
Like fast food. Shit, how far have we strayed from the song now? This is like one of the podcasts me and Brian make. But dig, there is no conspiracy behind all of the legal drugs (and I include fast food in this category) being the ones that make the populace stupid, lazy, and dependent. There IS, however, a willingness to use the parameters presented to acquire and maintain power. Now we're lurching into territory that can't be summmed up in an essay about a song in a never ending rock opera. Suffice to say that, what, we're all slaves to the chains society presents to us in the form of everything they make ads for during the Super Bowl? That's myoipic and too media obsessed.
In terms of THIS SONG? What matters are the relationships we make and maintain with other people. If you're clever enough you can twist anything into seeming like an addiction. The mansion is where I met the love of my life so I presume one could say that it's certainly acceptable to be addicted to love. And there you have it. It's been about Robert Palmer the whole fucking time.
notes:
- Paul told me that adding an "s" to Happy New Year is a Baltimore thing.
- The guitar solo was played as a goof with the intention of recording a better one later but Paul and Pork liked the original one.-
I'm using Paul's effect board on all of the 1993 stuff so as to have a different sound than the SFP-Brandy stuff.
- For the back up vocals we ran a mic through the guitar pedals. I love doing that because I usually know what effects I want on the vocals and it always takes a million years to find it in the fucking computer later. Just do it live. It always goes back to the Beatles. Lennon wold have the effects on his voice when he recorded the vocals. Look, man, it's MUCH more efficient for me to record the vocal with the effect already on it.
Happy New Years Baby
The nights go on forever dogs bark through the cold
UPS trucks rumble through holidays grown old
Grey skies hover blindly grey grass lies asleep
Grey roads rise through heaven grey breath slowly seeps
How many people died when live shrinks and melts in pride
Accomplishments are nigh happy new years baby
The fireplace burns forgiving so come in from the cold
Laughter ells and singing false stories here retold
A cat purrs in the corner the music gets a boost
The stroke of midnight passes and everyone cuts loose
Cocaine and whiskey buzz acid and shrooms a must
Heroin and crack for us happy new years baby
Sleep when the sun comes up afternoon and throwing up
See the folks and suck it up happy new years baby
It's just like what Lennon said
Years come and go and then you're dead
Winter sucks or so I've read
Happy new years baby
Can't wait 'til spring comes 'round
Krokus flowers in the ground
Now the stinking fields are brown
Happy new years baby
Dave - guitars, vocals, percussion
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - drums
Ian - mastering
1993 Essay May 2, 2019
When I was in my twenties I decided to conduct an experiment meant to test randomness and if randomness led to any noticeable patterns. I took all of my t-shirts and threw them into a gigantic pile in the middle of the cedar closet at my Mom's house. She was gracious enough to let me stay there after I stopped going to college. Every day I would close my eyes and root around the pile of literally hundreds of shirts and that'd be my shirt for the day. Once at a party my random shirt happened to be an old hospital shirt. A friend said something along the lines of "look at Tude. Most people go to the hospital and wear a shirt out. When they get home they throw it away or use it as a rag. Tude wears it to a party." That still gives me a chuckle.
What did I learn? Randomness is random. It led down a deconstructionist path that was essential in putting together the pieces for the never ending opera. Everything is arbitrary if you go back far enough. When I was a kid I read rock and roll biographies. Dave Marsh was my favorite. Later Lester Bangs was a god to me. Leg's McNeil writing for Spin was a golden age of magazine journalism. But I realized eventually, tracing the music I love back further and further, that rock and roll itself was a lie shouted by narcissistic Baby Boomers who had the good fortune of never having to face down an existential threat to their comfort. The 'Nam draftees are not included in my vitriol. They faced two enemies, Ho Chi Minn and Nixon. Hah! Where was I? Rock and roll was, is, and always will be a lie. The fact of the matter is that it's the same stuff that folk musicians had been doing for millennia. It wasn't special. Nothing is special. When you are born is arbitrary. The music of your youth is not special. You are not special.
What's this got to do with the song 1993? Wouldn't YOU like to know! I'll tell you. Remember a while back when the Hubble telescope was pointed at empty space and eventually it photographed a gazillion galaxies? That's the existential angst of arbitrary randomness right there. I fixed point in time and space, unassuming, nothing special about it (just like you) and yet, focus on it for an instant and it's the most spectacular thing ever in the cosmos. Just a tiny instant of focus and that specific reality is transformed, nothing into everything. Did it lose it's tag of nothingness when the discovery of everything was made? Does the discovery define that point in space? Did it even exist before the Hubble pointed at it? Deconstruct it further. To paraphrase Sam Kinison "we've hit another vein, mine deeper."
1993 is an arbitrary year picked at random with the specific idea of deconstructing it month by month and season by season to see what stories are told. The song birthed the concept with this'n. I wrote it for Doom Cookie. As a matter of fact the only reason this entry into the Never Ending Opera isn't under the name of Doom Cookie is that I made Brian promise that he would never let me stray from the Society Fringe Player name with future projects. He said it was smarter to be like my buddy Andrew Grimm, aka June Star, and keep the name forever whilst changing up the players.
Musically this song, through Paul's mixing, really accentuates the riff. In me pea-brain I always heard a fiddle playing the riff. I even borrowed one with the intent that I'd learn it enough to play the part when we recorded it but ALAS nyet!
I really want to hammer home the arbitrary underpinnings of all existence. It's arbitrary where you are born. It's arbitrary to what nation you owe allegiance. It's arbitrary which god was foisted upon you as a child. It's arbitrary if you dig your own gender. It's arbitrary if you get cancer. It's arbitrary if you have fun playing the guitar. Nothing is according to any plan. Keep deconstructing everything, eventually you'll get to a point of vacant nothingness and in a moment of mental anti-obliteration you'll realize that the entire everything was there the whole fucking time.
Looking at a corpse at dawn in 1993
Hit and run up the tab in 1993
Here I live in Baltimore in 1993
Born and raised wait to die in 1993
Segregate black and white in 1993
Baltimore Harbor night in 1993
It's like an alcoholic's dream
Blue collar bars and disco scenes
Poor rage and shoot up the interstate
Ain't life oh so great
Steaming crabs a baseball day in 1993
No football no subway in 1993
I'm feeling like I'm left behind in 1993
It never changes it never changes in 1993
Dave - stringed instruments and vocals
Paul, bass, recording, mixing
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
HARD 26 April 2019
Rather unfortunately whenever we played this song live in Doom Cookie it was preceded with an erection quip. "Quip" makes it sound urbane.
This is a Doom Cookie song. This whole fucking opera is about Doom Cookie. It's the central conceit of the concept. The protagonist is a "character" like the protagonist in Jack Kearuac's ON THE ROAD is a "character" or how Stone Cold Steve Austin is a "character." When I was younger and I read novels it appeared to me that a young writer's first novel was essentially a diary with narrative overtones grafted onto it with Borg-like efficiency - clumsy and obtrusive. So 1993 could be viewed as a debut novel. Maybe it's the passion project that an artists gets to make after a great success. HAH! Everything's a passion project to folk who fucking work.
Doom Cookie, though. The way that 1993 works is we take a year in the life of a young man and follow him around. It was inspired by Richard Linklater's SLACKERS in terms of mood and feel. The function of this song is back story. It was written figuratively,but it works just as well literally. I like the idea of a young man floating around the rock and roll world nationally, drifting from place to place- or figuratively drifting from style to style as encapsulated by city. Here's the point I've been making my entire life. The differences in the types of music in the USA are fucking minuscule. MINISCULE I SAY! I'm not talking between grunge and metal, I'm talking between trance and bluegrass. Can I get an amen? I've always been puzzled by how regular folk approach music. Surely it's the only art form where people routinely hate, proudly, any output that doesn't correspond with a 3 year period when that person was coming of age. The arbitrariness of this prejudice is breathing insanity. Of course all prejudice is if you step back and observe it.
Deconstructing societal mores led to this long and rambling narrative I've been endeavoring to release lo this past half decade. It takes Doctor Who as it's main influence. Doctor Who can tell any story it wants, in any pop culture genre, thanks to the TARDIS. That function here is appropriated by the "song." The "song" is what unites the disparate story lines and characaters and genres of this narrative. The "song" makes this entire enterprise magical. As far as I can tell this has never been attempted. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get people to understand it. These essays are helping. They're functioning as a mental Tetris for me - much like psychedelic experiences fom my younger days. It's as if I'm stepping out of day to day existence and arranging these blocks of information in the story that they want me to tell. The blocks are the songs DUH!
This is why the trail run is so important. It helps alter consciousness so as to heal wounds dealt by the world of subsistence. It's why the human race found drugs for fuck's sake. It's funny how the absolute worst drugs are always the legal ones and how the drugs that inspire art and questioning are always demonized. Funny, right? If you keep along the deconstructionist path eventually everything loses all meaning it once had. That's the exhilarating part of it. Which reminds me of a thought I had out on the trails yesterday. Friedrich Nietzsche may have been a profoundly different man if he listed weights and ran in the woods. It may have given him the confidence to say the shit he only wrote about. You know what that would have made him? The Stone Cold Steve Austin of his time.
So here's to yuh!
Wake up Monday morning and I look around
I felt bad this morning and my hair fell to the ground
She came by on Wednesday with a wedding ring
I ducked out on Thursday, baby, and hocked my wedding ring
It's hard
So I went out to Seattle to try to find a band
But nobody did want me they wouldn't let me lend a hand
So I cruised on down to LA and got a new tattoo
But nobody knew Chuck Berry songs or "Blue Suede Shoes"
It's hard
So I went on down to Athens but I played too hard
Flew to the Twin Cities but they wouldn't let me in the yard
So I hitch hiked back to Baltimore and I shot myself
Now I'm paralyzed but I have found myself
It's hard
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - engineering, drums
Ian - mastering
WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019WHEN CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN 15 APRIL 2019
When I was a kid I voraciously tore through biographies of the Beatles instead of text books. Even then I had little faith in being educated by people whom I thought were stupid. That's a Bootstrap Theory type of thing caused by reading too many damn John Lennon interviews. Humility would hit hard later.
One thing both Lennon and Paul McCartney would talk about was that, being songwriters, they wanted to write songs for occasions that had a chance to become standards. That's why they wrote their Christmas songs, "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" for John and "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" for Paul. Both of them songs cut to the essence of them fellas for real. You wonder what each might have added to the other's but that's a recipe for a lifetime of WTF.
In College Park I was writing a rock opera with my buddy Joel Baily. We were in a band called Love and Hate. We changed our name to Forgotten Sons when that crap hair band Love/Hate started getting played on MTV. Joel and I wrote together all the time. We made a point of it. We wanted to be rock stars. As far as we were concerned we already WERE rock stars so we wrote us a song for the occasion of the winter solstice.
Dig - this is pretty much the song we wrote. It stuck with me all these years. If a song sticks with me for decades I eventually record it, or try to anyway. This was around the time of "Do They Know It's Christmas" - all that pre-internet troglodytal ignorance of the cultures that aren't derived from the Anglo-Saxons. I honestly didn't know that the entire world wasn't celebrating Santa and Jesus on December 25th. Holy fucking shit how the fuck did we exist? I think a big deal was when the Cold War ended and then China started reengaging with the world. Collectively the human race began remembering that there were other parts of the globe besides where one is born, lives, and dies. Around the time of the 9/11 terror attacks (which happens to be my fucking birthday) I added the stuff about"embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me." You know, channelling my inner peacenik. You can add American Christians to that list as well. In general that's a spiteful and mean segment of my beloved Americans. That sentence right there hints at my own unrealized bigotry. It's a constant battle.
Chances are you've already heard this song. I release it every year in December on whatever social media site is available. I'm very proud of it.
Recording wise we did the sleigh bells and the tuned water glasses but my favorite part is at the end when the acoustic guitar doubles the mandolin riff. These things happen during recording. The way I have always operated, or tried to, is that you roll the tape and see what happens during overdubs. That's the funnest part - the spontaneity.
I was anxious to hear how Paul melded together the everything plus the kitchen sink approach I enjoy during recording and fuck if he didn't impress the living shit out of me with this mix. That's something I learned from Brian - trust the guy mixing. HE'S the one spending all the time sorting through vague ideas and sculpting a whole.
So I hope you like this one. The arbitrariness of the release is maybe my favorite thing about this song at present.
Quickly - I purposely avoided any talk of the origins of what for all intents and purposes is an ancient celebration based on the movements of the stars. "Ancient" means, judging by the latest discoveries in anthropology, 100,000-200,000 years old. That deficiency of knowledge outside of one's own lineage is the sticking point that unscrupulous leaders use to aquire and sustain power. It's a useful tool. I have grown profoundly dissappointed in the reaction of the free peoples of the Earth to the vast networks of interwebs. I had mostly assumed that people were generally thoughtful and reasonable where as, if this past decade is taken as a sample of the reaction of civilization to new technologies that are inherently complicated to understand and yet superlatively easy to use, most people are easily swayed and governed by predjudice and place. I'm still astounded that the great experiment of the fouding fathers has survived this long because, clearly, as I sit here on 16 April 2019, the idea is better than the species to which it was gifted in hopes of a better world.
Have a great Christmas this spring!
Christmas means togetherness and love and joy
Happiness and presents for the girls and boys
Old folk come together and then reminisce
Stand beneath the mistletoe and get a kiss
Love your friends and kin
When Christmas comes again
Shout out to the homeless in America
The starving out in Asia and in Africa
Embrace all of the faiths that would love to kill me
The majority of folk through time just weren't free
Go remember them
When Christmas comes again
Make sure that you bring your love at Christmas time
People come and go but love is all the time
People they pass on but their love still exists
So let that love inside your hearts and reminisce
Love brings love, my friend
When Christmas comes again
Dave - guitars, vocals, mandolin, glasses
Paul - bass, engineering, mixing
Wil - drums
Ian -mastering
TIME FOR A CHANGE 1 APRIL 2019
Everything blends together eventually. You can call it entropy, erosion, degredation, there's a millions words through out time trying to explain decay. Maybe that's where we went wrong. Do we need to explain it? Can we just accept it? My fallback position when I get intellectualy lazy is "this is beyond human language." That's an obvious cop out.
I bring this up because I have two distinct memories of where this song was written - WAIT - they are one in the same! My timeline is off. Phew! I'm only still as crazy as when I woke up this morning.
The year was 1988. I had taken a year off from school to ingest large amounts of psychedelic drugs and then returned. I went to and lived at the University Of Maryland College Park, Cumberland Hall - a co-ed building. The previous year, 1987, was a great year for rock and roll. I spent the summer living and working (ish) in Ocean City, MD. That's also the last time I was arrested. Music-wise, for the under(ish) ground, the Mats had released PLEASE TO MEET ME. For mainstream bros and hos GnR's APPETITE FOR DESTRCUCTION was making everyone want to try heroin. For the collegiate types U2 had THE JOSHUA TREE and REM had DOCUMENT. The good music bled into '88 and provided a youthful guitar heavy soundtrack to my life. Public Enemy and NWA were about to pop.
I played in a band in Bawmer - Kona, the next in a long line of people who refused to play my fucking songs. So I would go to school during the week and come home on the weekends to play fucking cover songs to drunks. It was a way to keep my chops sharp. I can't stress this enough. It was a constant struggle to get anyone to play my songs. They referred to them as "originals" like they were some odd alien lifeform beyond the mere talents of idiot Marylanders. My reasoning was always "somebody had to write these fucking songs we're covering - they didn't just appear!" But the poeple around me who played gyuitars were always "yeah but they're songwriters. We're just people from Baltimore." Baltimore I love you but sometimes you really suck. So not having the resources to actually play all these fucking songs I was writing I categorized them in my own little library code - the Davey Decimal System.
That's a lot of backstory. I wrote "Time For a Change" when my best friend Made Hood was moving to Bali to study ethnomusicology. I was also moving on from my freshman year at college. It was a reset moment. Made was NOT someone who discouraged my songwriting. We actually wrote together. Two of our compositions eventually made it - part of them anyway - to THE BIG OPERA. He wrote the "slide on by" chorus in "The Orphan" and we came up with the riff to "How Do You Like That" after smoking around an ounce of weed.
This song, obviously, works well as an opener. So whenever I needed a first song in an opera I used this'n. It's not plot specific so you can use it anywhere - any setting, any time period. The only detail is "kazoo." It just so happenned that this song found a home in 1993. It was roughly written around this time, me being a young man who didn't know anything yet but was confident enough to try to make poeple learm his songs.
Musically this was recorded at The Shed in rural Bawmer County with Paul Kelley and Wil Berry, aka "Porky." Pork was the first guy EVER who was into playing my songs as the reason for a band. I'm forever grateful. Dig - by this time I was in my mid twenties. In my mind I had lost around a decade trying to convince people that we were worthy to write. It got easier for people coming up after me. There was no stigma to creativity for them. So I wrote this during Kona and a little interim band called Pritty Hary played it and then it sat in the 1993 folder for 20 years. This arrangement is pretty much the same as when it was written and demoed on my little TASCAM 4 track.
If you remember me you see
Think of the blood pumping through
If I remember you playing your kazoo
Please remember me
If I were you and you were me
Then just what would you see
When feeling kind of rough
Looking pretty gruff
Be remembering
It's time for a change
Look around that person
Find out what is certain
Choose the other curtain
Yeah but it might bring the worst in
Right now I feel like shit and that's it
Right now nobody's here
And then I think of you wondering what you'd do
If you see me too clear
It's tiume for a change
Dave - guitars and vocals
Paul - engineering, mixing, bass
Pork - drums
Ian - mastering
WINTERTIME ACOUSTIC 21 March 2019
During a nice hot Maryland summer a couple of years back I was helping my buddy Paul cut down a bunch of dead pine trees on the property his family has owned since somewhere back in the sepia toned days before people realized other people existed. Big suckers they were, full of sap and sharp edges that would slice up your shins and calves if you were foolish enough to wear shorts. I was doing the grunt work for Paul and his mom's husband. They cut 'em down and chopped 'em up and I moved the big shit into a dump truck and the small shit into a succession of burn piles. My dad had recently died and Paul asked how I was doing.
"I'm more relieved than anything else." I said.
"You aren't depressed or anything? I was when my dad died. I didn't know it until later and then it hit me."
I shrugged. I WAS relieved. I was the executor for his estate. I had carted him around to all of his doctors appointments for his COPD which he had although he never smoked. He was a doctor. He had a formality to him that, as I got older, I found endearing. Due to some arrangement with him and my mom he never paid any child support. So although we lived in a big ol' victorian in Old Catonsville times were tight. He always bought me shit, though, and having divorced parents both buying Christmas presents was, hmm, something that happened.
So cut to a year later and my wife and I have dedicated my dad's old Jeep Grand Cherokee to Baltimore Animal Rehabilitation Center and it hit me. That was the last physical bit of my Dad's shit that was still hanging around. So I sent ol' Paul a text message along the lines of "dude you were dead on it just hit me today my fucking dad is dead."
Paul's a musician, a bass player, and he's been a dedicated listener to all the wacky shit that Brian and I put out on the Society Fringe Podcast Podcast. Somewhere between Circle 9 and SFP, Circle 9's drummer Wilmer Earl Berry Jr (Pork) had joined Paul's band, Pearly Goats, one of my favorite fucking bands. I had all my operas lined up to record with Brian. He said he needed a break (after only 13 albums in 2 years? Crazy, right?) so I figured I'd record 1993 during the break with Paul and Pork. This being life, things happen and now I'm working on the Brian-Andy SFP concurrently with the Paul-Pork SFP. It's still one long narrative that takes place over the course of centuries and eventually millenia. The 1993 stuff is rooted in young adult ennui devoid of romantic roadtrips and gunfights in the vast American desert and the Far East. It's a companion piece to Travelogue - happening at the same time, but rooted in realism. The main relationships are the fella, his dad, and his girlfriend. Mainly it's about him and his dad getting on each others' nerves. I didn't realize it until I returned to it when it became clear that it could actually be done. By "done" I mean recorded andreleased.
So, dig, each act is a season in the year of Bawmerhun 1993. "Acoustic Wintertime" starts it off because musically it foreshadows a song in WINTER and we had changed the arrangement into what eventually became "Stoner Wintertime." It was important that the jarring strum patterns were heard because they get revisited in SPRING in a song actually about jarring strum patterns. I like how it starts with "ready?" and we're off. Paul's on his standup. This is a demo for Pork. I initially wanted to put the version from the original demo I recorded while Circle 9 was working on THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES but this version came up and inserted itself into the equation. In these long narratives I take these kinds of things as signs that this is how the story wants to be told. It's fun to see patterns that you didn't know existed. It's like submerging your ego in pursuit of something "other."
So here you go. Paul and Pork ain't as into talking about their art as Bri and Andy so I'm going to do essays for the 1993 stuff. It will save a dickton of money, relatively, because this'll just be songs without the hour long spitball session Briy and I tag onto everything. I told him we still had to do some because it's become a clearinghouse for mental shit we go through. Lucky you for getting to hear it.
The bold and ragged beauty of a winter tree
Struck Susan as quite odd as she looked to see
A table full of papers but none up to date
No chance to glimpse beauty when you're running late
-----
A far off police siren pierces through the air
But Billy doesn't notice and he doesn't care
Sirens don't man nothing in the county jail
Doing time's the fine when you can't make the bail
-----
In wintertime the sun don't shine
The ice it shines the world's unkind
-----
An accident just happened out on National Pike
Some lady ran a red light sliding through the ice
Valentine's Day candy scattered on the street
Now my car is totaled and it's raining sleet
The windows creak and moan as the wind bears down
Whipping through a tree branch lying on the ground
The screen door whistles loudly and the yard is froze
And me I write a song and I can't feel my toes
chorus
Dave - guutar and vocal
Paul - engineering, stand up bass
Ian - mastering
00 "Baby Please Don't Go" Plastic Ono Mothers Of Invention
05 This would be the song playing over the credits at the end of the movie.
10 REAL TIME LISTEN
15 Supine: Face down. Prone: Face up.
20 I don't like one uppers.
25 He's not a mean boy
30 I might, yeah, it's that new fresh feeling.
35 It wouldn't have made sense to anyone that isn't in this room.
40 This is where it slips.\
45 Schedules conflict.
50 I have to be the grounding thing.
55 We had already signed on for SPACESHIPS GUNS AND BOOBIES