Damn You, Andy Williams
I will never get back the time and mental energy I spent as a 6-year-old in 1976 trying to decipher a throwaway novelty pop song from 1958.
This week’s blog is brought to you by the word “mondegreen”. A mondegreen is when the listener mishears a lyric from a song as a funny or nonsensical line as opposed to the actual words. The term was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright, who had heard an old Scottish ballad as a child and interpreted the line“They laid him on the green” as“The Lady Mondegreen”. Some of the more famous mondegreens include “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” instead of “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky”, from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”,“There’s a bathroom on the right”instead of “There’s a bad moon on the rise”,from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising”,“The girl with colitis goes by”in place of“The girl with kaleidoscope eyes”from The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, et cetera, et cetera. Hell, there are so many misinterpretations of Manfred Mann’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light” that nobody’s really sure what the “revved up like a douche” line actually is. I mean, I guess you could look it up, but where’s the fun in that?
Anyway, I digress. This is the story of yours truly as an extremely unworldly kindergartener, with utterly no frame of reference for Pop Culture (beyond a borderline-maniacal obsession with the TV shows Happy Days and Sha Na Na, that is), mondegreening the living shit out of an Andy Williams record.
A year or so earlier, my younger sister Jill and I had been gifted a battered and scratched stack of unsleeved 45 rpm singles that had belonged to our mom and her sister, our Aunt Pat, in the late 1950s. At every opportunity, we would play them on our little orange GE portable record player, and they slowly pushed our Disney movie soundtrack LPs out of heavy rotation.
Oh, the flood of sense memories finding this photo online gave me…
It was an absolutely bonkers assortment of songs and artists, that I suspect they got through one of those mail-order record clubs that used to keep sending you stuff in a never-ending flood. I remember some of my favorites were “Chattanooga Choo Choo”by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, (featuring Tex Beneke on vocals!), “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” by Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, “Young Blood” by the Coasters, Tab Hunter’s rather anemic version of Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”,backed with his even more anemic version of Marty Robbins’ “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” (which had a bad skip; to this day I hear it in my head: “A white…sport coat… and a piiiinnnk… carrrrrnation… nation… nation… nation…”), and Steve Lawrence’s cover of Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll”. Apparently, Mom and Aunt Pat had a taste for squeakier-cleaner watered-down covers of the Real Stuff, although Lawrence’s “Party Doll” does have a couple absolutely ripping guitar solos. Really. Check it out.
The king of the hill/top of the heap of the collection, the crown jewel, was Elvis Presley’s 1958 hit “All Shook Up” (b/w “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”), our copy of which I literally wore out, and still adore to this day. A lot of those songs were certifiably unhip, but I can trace my all-encompassing love of music directly back to that weird-ass, beat up stack of 45s, especially that Elvis song. No joke. Along with my well-thumbed copy of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, those records and that little turntable were my prized possessions as a little kid. Those songs are deep in my blood, as lame as some of them undeniably are in retrospect.
Speaking of…
One of the other 45s that sank its teeth in me (capped and snowy, pearly white as they may have been) was another banger from 1958, by Andy Williams. I feel like Andy Williams is slowly fading from the world’s collective memory, which is kind of a shame. He was a crooner in the grand Bing Crosby tradition who had a hit TV variety show for almost a decade. Audrey Hepburn may have sung “Moon River” in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but Andy Williams made it his own theme song, recording his version the following year and scoring a massive hit with it. He also made a metric shit ton of Christmas albums and holiday TV specials; chances are, if you hear “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” when you’re out Christmas shopping, you’re hearing his version.
Good ol’ AW was represented in that old stack of records with his hit single, “Hawaiian Wedding Song”. That track never really grabbed my young ear (too mushy for my taste at the time, probably), but the absolute banger on the B-side sure did: “The House of Bamboo”.
Looking back with 50 years of accumulated life experience, I can now clearly picture the meeting with Williams and his manager and the record label: “Andy, you gotta give the kids something. They’re crazy about this Beatnik scene. We got a song for you- the kids are gonna love it.”
At the time I first heard it, however, I didn’t have the faintest idea what a beatnik was. My worldview was limited. Almost every line in the song flew over my head. Didn’t matter, though. It had bongos. To paraphrase Lloyd Lindsay Young on the Beastie Boys’ “B-Boy Boullabaisse”, it was a trip, it had a funky beat, and I could bug out to it. I sang along to it, too- loud and proud, blissfully unaware of most of what I was singing about, phoneticizing a great deal of the lyrics. The mondegreens, rest assured, were mondegreening.
And now, beloved, I will treat you to what nobody asked for: I will parse the lyrics of “The House of Bamboo”, both as I heard them as a 6-year-old, and with annotations by an older, wiser person who’s had the song stuck in a cobwebby back corner of his brain for nigh on 49 years and is desperate to get it out. Feel free to listen along here:
Number FIfty-Four
The house with the bamboo door
Bamboo roof and bamboo walls
They’ve even got a bamboo floor
(I’m no structural engineer, but this seems like an ill-advised method of construction, especially for a public gathering place.)
You must get to know SoHo Joe
(6-year-old Tod, growing up in neither New York City nor London, but rather in rural Ohio, had no idea where or what SoHo was. So I thought the owner in question was a Korean man named So Ho Cho.)
He runs an espresso
(Again- what’s an espresso? No clue. But I let this one slide with a shrug.)
Called the House of Bamboo
It’s-a made of sticks
Sticks and bricks
(Now hold on. I thought it had a bamboo door, roof, walls, and floor. Now you’re saying it’s made of sticks and bricks? At this point Andy Williams is becoming an unreliable narrator.)
But you can get your kicks
At the House of Bamboo
In this casino
You can drink a ‘chino
(I didn’t know what an espresso was, so what were the odds I’d know what a cappuccino was, much less a slang word for cappuccino (that I’m not sure is actually a thing)? But, again, I let it slide.)
And it’s gotcha swingin’ to the cha cha
(Here’s perhaps the biggest swing-and-a-miss on young Tod’s part: being unfamiliar with the cha cha dance, I assumed a “chacha” was a part of the building. I pictured the chacha being up in the rafters somewhere, like a lofted ceiling. SIDE NOTE: I didn’t realize until I was writing this piece that Andy Williams sings “swingin’ TO the cha cha”. I had, up until now, thought he sang “swingin’ THROUGH the cha cha”, which implies that there was a rope hanging from the ceiling that you could use to swing through the chacha. Seems like a liability lawsuit waiting to happen, So Ho Cho. Hope you’ve lawyered up, or at least make folks sign a waiver before climbing up in the chacha. Someone could get badly hurt, especially if it’s not load-bearing bamboo.)
Dance the bolero in a sombrero
(Bolero??? At this point I was just making sounds with my mouth as I was singing.)
And shake like a snake
(I really liked this part, because a maraca came in during the pause after that line, and it sounded like a rattlesnake. PRODUCTION VALUE!)
You wanna drop in when the cats are hoppin’
(Wait, it’s got cats, too? This place is awesome.)
Let your two feet move-a to the big beat
Pick yourself a kitten and a-listen to a platter
That rocks the jukebox
(So you can come in, have a ‘chino (?) and, while you’re working up the nerve to climb up into the chacha and swing around on the rope, you can pick out one of many kittens that are available to play with. So Ho Cho was a visionary businessman who predicted the rise of modern cat cafés, 60 years ahead of the curve.)
I’m-a tellin’ you
When you’re blue
Well, there’s a lot to do
At the House of Bamboo
(CLEARLY.)
(At this point there’s a groovy little call-and-response with Andy and a guitar. I was already, at the age of 6 [9 years before I actually started playing], zeroing in on guitar parts in songs. My life was pre-ordained, folks; I had no choice.)
(Dut Dut Dut Dunut Nut Nuh)
You’ve got to know
(Da Da Duh)
SoHo Joe
(Dununuh Nut Nut Nuh)
He runs an espresso
Called the House of Bamboo
(Dut Da Duh)
In this casino
You can drink a ‘chino
Let your two feet move-a to the big beat
Pick yourself a kitten and listen to a platter
That rocks
(Really pushing the kittens. Smart marketing.)
I’m a-tellin’ you
When you’re blue
Well there’s a lot to do
At the House of Bamboo.
Number Fifty-Four
The house with the bamboo door
Bamboo roof and bamboo walls
They’ve even got a bamboo floor
In the House of Bamboo
Aaaand, SCENE.
Later on, I realized that Andy wasn’t singing about cats, which paints the House of Bamboo in a different, possibly sordid light. Was So Ho Cho a pimp? Was this a House of Bamboo of ill-repute? A House of Bamboo of the Rising Sun? Or was it just an innocent place to meet girls, like Surf City in the Jan and Dean song? A target-rich environment, as Maverick put it in Top Gun? We may never know for sure.
I was sitting in a drive-through in Camarillo, California yesterday and saw a building across the 101 called the House of Bamboo. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t get to investigate, but not in too big of a hurry to take a photo and text my sister:
Our ensuing conversation put this song back in my head. I had to exorcise it by writing this blog. I’m sorry/you’re welcome.
Weirdly, while I was researching “The House of Bamboo” I learned that last year, 67 years after its release, “THoB” actually charted in the UK, thanks to its being featured in the TV show This City Is Ours, so maybe I counted Andy Williams out prematurely. I can only hope that this weird little earworm of a song is alive again, feeding on the young clueless brains of a new generation, and that there’s at least one little British kid who’s hearing it, bopping around the house, and wondering what a chacha is. Damn you, Andy Williams. And thank you.
YA GOTTA KEEP ‘EM CAFFEINATED
As the world –metaphorically speaking– continues to take foggy mountain roads at faster and faster speeds and spend more time on two wheels than four, I find myself (here in my fetal position in the back seat) looking for new ways to stay grounded, centered, and present; to try and curb my tendency to stew and spiral. I wish it was easier. I come from a long line of worriers. Anxiety and rumination often feel like my factory default settings and, after a recent longer, bleaker period than usual of letting existential dread and despair wash over me, I’ve decided that a reset is long overdue.
As a result, I’ve recently doubled down on developing some new habits. Good ones, that is; I’ve already got enough of the other kind, thank you very much. For some examples: I’m exercising every day. I’m writing this blog you’re reading right now; I promised myself I’d write and post an entry a week and, six weeks in, that’s exactly what I’ve done. And, most recently, I’ve started a series in my Instagram stories: “T.I.D.”, or “Today I’m Digging”. I pick a little thing that I’m doing, or something that catches my ear or my eye, and I celebrate it. It’s similar to one of those “Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7, exhale for 8” breathing exercises. It forces me to slow down, to notice the beauty that’s still around us in abundance, despite what the news tries to tell us. I’m trying to do it on a daily basis. I’m not quite there yet, but it’s on its way to becoming a habit, and by telling myself to keep an eye out for today’s T.I.D., I feel like I’m slowly rewiring my brain, recalibrating the way I approach my life- my own little version of a gratitude journal. If nothing else, it helps make my corner of Instagram a happier place, and that’s good enough for me.
All these little self-imposed steps and tasks are doing a pretty good job of giving my day a sense of positive structure. I realize it’s at odds with my chaotic-by-nature chosen vocation as a “creative type”, but I’m a sucker for structure. Always have been. I thrive on procedure and routine (if there’s any truth to the whole “past lives” thing, I’m pretty sure that I was a soldier in many of my previous trips around the block). At the same time, I’m trying to say “yes” to things as much as possible, to invite a little serendipity in, while hoping it plays nice with my love of order and duty and service. It’s a razor’s edge. You remember Aesop’s fable about the grasshopper and the ants? There are plenty of both of those critters in my bloodline, and the struggle of that dichotomy, as they say, is real.
Ojai Coffee Roasters, my portal to 1995.
There’s a little place downtown- Ojai Coffee Roasters. When my wife and I moved to Ojai three and a half years ago, I started going there most mornings to write (speaking of habits, that’s one I’m trying hard to pick up again.). Ojai Coffee was like a portal to 1995, when I would hang out at Front Street Coffee House in Dayton, Ohio every night, writing the first batch of Shrug songs and jacking myself up beyond all reason on caffeine. Ojai Coffee brought me full circle back to that world. I started churning out lyrics and became friends with the owner, Stacey, as well as the rest of the staff.
This is not a tangent. Stick with me.
Last September I got back to Ojai after spending a month and a half in Ohio. My dad’s health was failing, and I had gone back home to spend time with him and help my mom and sister with all the things that come with the end of a loved one’s life (duty and procedure, amiright?). On my first visit back to the shop, Stacey sat down at my table and we talked about dying parents, grief, family obligation, and such. She was, as always, very kind. The conversation changed to what I’d missed since leaving town and she mentioned that the employee whose job it was to roast the coffee in house was moving out of the area. It had been on Stacey’s radar, but the departure had been bumped up suddenly, and Stacey was trying to figure things out.
Under her breath she quipped, “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in learning how to roast coffee…?”
We chuckled. Then I stopped chuckling and started thinking. I thought about how many of my favorite jobs, music projects, side quests, and adventures I had fallen back-asswards into, out of the blue. I thought about the funk I was in with my dad’s situation and the general shambolic state of the world, and how maybe getting out of my own head a little and trying something new would do me some good and help distract me. I thought about how I needed to start saying “yes” again. After hearing that it required only a few hours of my time a week, I signed on as a Roaster To Be.
I’m 55 years old, people. The overwhelming majority of my day to day life consists of activities I’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The chance to start as an absolute beginner at something –from square one– at my age and learn an entirely new skill is rare. It’s intimidating and scary. But it’s also pretty exhilarating. I had never seen a coffee roasting machine before. I had never seen a raw coffee bean before. So you can imagine the barrage of new information lobbed at me at my first training session. I took copious notes, made little drawings, determined not to screw up. Stacey’s daughter, Olivia, was also learning the ropes with me. We arranged that I would roast on Mondays and Olivia would take Thursdays and, after a couple sessions, keeping an eye on each other, making some mistakes, and recovering from them, we flew solo.
“Isn’t she looooovely…”
The airplane analogy is not a perfect one, but it does fit. My procedure fetish has a warm, cozy home in coffee roasting. The roaster itself is a big, beautiful, vaguely Jules Verne-ish contraption, all brass levers and gauges, chutes and hoppers, and getting a consistent roast requires attention and repetition. Each roast ideally takes between 19 and 22 minutes. The digital temperature display needs to show a rate of increase of roughly 5 seconds per degree. Too fast, and the beans don’t roast in the middle. Too slow, and you’re just baking them instead of roasting. Light roast Ethiopian and Decaf Peruvian come out at 425. Medium roasts, anywhere from 435 to 445. Darker roasts stay in until 460. There are checklists and steps that need to be done and entered in a log along the way, all to the steady heartbeat of 5 seconds per degree:
Gas lever up full airflow lever up full to cooling bin setting power switch on motor switch on burner switch on watch through viewport and wait for burners to light once lit evenly adjust gas lever for 5 seconds per degree rise rate first roast goes in at 400 stopwatch on log start time keep temperature rise rate at 5 seconds per degree at 300 airflow lever all the way down to roasting bin setting for a minute or so until most of the chaff is gone from the bin viewing port airflow back up to cooling bin keeping checking the temperature rise rate move airflow lever to half between 366 and 375 when the beans start turning cinnamon brown in viewport watch that temperature rise rate as temperature nears 388 open bean inspector shaft and listen for first crack when beans start cracking like popcorn move airflow lever full down and log time and temperature at 400 log afterburner reading turn on cooling bin motor and load next roast into hopper listen for second crack around 438 log time and temperature airflow full up gas lever off note temperature empty beans from roaster into cooling bin close rooster bin wipe down chute and inside of roaster bin hatch open hopper empty new roast into roaster reset stopwatch log time and final temperature watch for temperature display to bottom out relight burners adjust gas to halfway when temperature starts rising repeat steps with new roast empty beans from cooling bin at 300 wipe down cooling bin chute when finished roasting clean chaff out of air supply cavities clean fan blades every other roast chaff collection tube every 4 or 5 roasts oil motor every month rear bearings every 40 hours front bearings every 6 months restock beans up front make any notes for Olivia’s Thursday roast repeat next Monday wham bam thank you maam
As this little dance becomes a routine and I’ve internalized the steps, the initial anxiety has given way to a kind of serenity that comes with making a practice out of something. Watching the beans being sifted in the cooling bin is a hypnotic, Zen-like experience. My previous life as a radio host (another shining example of saying “yes” to serendipity) has gifted me a very accurate internal clock and I find myself meditating on “one…two…three…four…five…” whether I’m watching the temperature display or not. Honestly, the most stressful part of the whole process is determining what batches of beans need restocked when I start my shift.
OH- and the smell. The smell. Delightful. I come home every Monday smelling like coffee, and my wife who, in an earlier life, chased the coffee dragon until she had to quit and switch over to tea, keeps walking past and sniffing me for a little micro dose hit of her past.
Stacey’s a kind soul and a good boss, and Ojai Coffee is a happy ship. I’m proud to be a part of it. What started as an out-of-left-field “yes” has become a centerpiece of my week. Structure and serendipity, living in symbiosis. And any shakes I get from too much free coffee are alleviated by the knowledge I’m being of service to something and learning a craft. I’m no expert, not by a long shot, but I’m working on that. In the meantime, raise a cup of joe and join me in a toast:
To healthy new tricks for old dogs. Woof.
Ojai Coffee Roasters ships its coffee anywhere. If you’d like to sample my handiwork, here’s their website.
WHEN THE GOOD GUYS WIN
I’ve got some good news for you.
Good news is in exceedingly short supply these days, isn’t it? It’s practically unobtainium, in fact. I’m 100% certain you didn’t need me to tell you that, because you’re an informed, sentient human, raised to try to do the right thing and care about other people. I’m one, too. And it’s been exhausting and disheartening, these years and years of seeing people like you and me suffer under the actions of a handful of old men (and they are almost always old men, aren’t they?) who have had the empathy-shaped holes in their souls filled in by money and power, like lumps of cold solder. It’s dismaying in ways that will wear you down and numb you if you’re not mindful, to the point that, when a truly mind bogglingly egregious thing occurs, it shakes you out of a stupor you were barely aware you were in and throws a harsh spotlight on all the stuff you had been dissociating yourself from and it all comes flooding in and it’s a whole thing and it breaks your heart all over again.
Just me?
Nah, I doubt it.
Anyway, I got off topic. That’s not what I opened up the laptop to write about. Like I said- I’ve got some good news, and it hit me like a shot of badly-needed B12.
I have a dear friend named Jack Piatt. Those who know me have seen and heard that name pop up a lot over the years. Jack and I grew up about 25-or-so minutes apart, in the Ohio cornfields of Preble and Miami Counties, respectively. We didn’t actually meet until our 20s, though, when his Uncle George (a mensch in his own right) brought him to Canal Street Tavern one evening in the late 90s to see my band Shrug play. I had no inkling at the time how much the course of my life changed that night.
Since that night, Jack has been a constant champion of my music. He’s believed in me even in the times when I didn’t, he’s spoken my name in more rooms than I’ll ever know, and damn near every cool opportunity that has come my way since I moved to California has been, directly or indirectly, a result of Jack’s doing. He’s never failed to deliver the goods on something he’s told me about and, as a result, I’d follow Jack into Hell.
He’s a gifted poet, writer, and filmmaker, but above all, I’d call Jack a professional Lifter. He lifts people up. He’s a kind, thoughtful, honest person, who truly cares about folks. He got me back in the habit of saying “you’re welcome” instead of “sure thing” or “no problem” when someone thanks me for something; an acknowledgement that, instead of brushing off the transaction, says, “Yes, I did you a service, and I was happy to, and I’d do it again.” It’s a subtle distinction, but a real one. A Real One, just like Jack
Last year, Jack helped produce a short film called The Singers. It’s based on a 19th-Century story by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, about a collection of down-on-their-luck societal misfits who have an impromptu singing contest in a bar. The Singers is a Caravaggio painting brought to life, beautifully shot by director Sam Davis, and the decision to cast the film entirely with actual singers, buskers, and performers with no professional acting experience was a creative gamble that paid off in spades. You really believe these folks, because…well…they’re real. I’ve seen it at least a half dozen times, in various forms, from rough cuts to the finished product, and I have laughed out loud and cried every single time. I told Jack after watching the first rough version how deeply moving it was, how it was something special, and the best thing he’s ever been involved in.
Turns out I was not alone in this opinion because, after bagging 35 awards in 50 film festivals, The Singers won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film (in an ultra-rare 2-way tie with Two Strangers Exchanging Saliva) this past Sunday.
My man Jack now has an Oscar, and I can’t fully express how over-the-moon proud I am of him and the whole cast and crew. There’s a lot of good left in the world, and we need to celebrate it, now more than ever.
The Singers is now streaming on Netflix. I urge you to do yourself and your sense of humanity a huge solid and check it out.
You’re welcome.
CONNECTING (or the Gospels of Monk and Beefheart)
All things being equal, I’d rather be known as a good musician than as a good guitarist.
I’m not saying I’m either of those things, mind you. I’m speaking in strictly aspirational terms. The journey’s never over, and I’m light years away from where I want to be in both realms, but still…I’d rather be known as a good musician than as a good guitarist.
There’s a subtle distinction between those two things- one that laypersons (by which I mean those without the affliction of being compelled to create music) may not be aware of on the surface, but the distinction is there, and it’s an important one. That difference is what makes some music audio wallpaper and other music a miraculous, life-enriching experience.
I’d rather be known as a good musician than as a good guitarist.
For my purposes I’m using the term “guitarist”, because guitar’s my chosen instrument, the one that sank its teeth into me 40 years, three months and (*checks date*) six days ago, and never let go. But you can plug any other instrument into that sentence and it’ll work just fine, because the principle is universal.
Control yourselves, ladies.
To save you from having to do the math, I got my first guitar on January 4th, 1986. I was a fifteen-year-old in the rural midwestern US. Aside from a bizarre and precocious obsession with 30s and 40s big band Swing a few years earlier, the main conduits to music in my isolated, MTV-less life were the two area radio stations powerful enough to reach the barren wastelands I called home. One was Z93, which peddled Top 40 Pop. The other was WTUE. ‘TUE focused on the “Classic Rock” of the 60s and 70s, while liberally sprinkling in the contemporary hard rock and heavy metal that was enjoying its heyday in that neck of the woods. Being a teenage boy with a thirst for bombast and a surplus of testosterone (and no other responsible way of using either), it’s no surprise that I steered clear of the lighter pop of Z93 and gravitated to the other option. I was a ‘TUE kid.
It was a halcyon time for excess, the 80s were, and the world of hard rock distilled the times to a tee. Nearly every band was a whirlwind of color and spandex, and the Aqua Net budgets alone dwarfed the entire recording and touring budgets of your average modern-day group. But even more crucially, every band needed a hot shot guitar slinger. Guitar solos were epic displays of virtuosity and acrobatics, meant to drop jaws (and other things), and may merciful God help you on the Billboard charts if your song didn’t have one. It was the Age of Shred. Edward Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Randy Rhoads were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
I confess to having a soft spot for a lot of that music to this day; after all, the stuff you listen to in your teen years will always stick with you and, as a young pup trying to crack the code of what a guitar could do, all that flash was a good motivator to practice. But on an artistic level, most of that stuff was empty calories, a big bowl of Fruity Pebbles for breakfast that leaves you exhausted and drained in fourth-period Algebra once the sugar wears off. The lyrics were, by and large, afterthoughts- vapid and vacant, not particularly geared for introspection. I realize now that this was clearly a byproduct of the copious amounts of high-quality Peruvian marching powder consumed by the music business at the time. Who cares about the Human Condition when you’re gakked to the gills? I’m not saying there’s not a place for celebratory good-time tuneage, but making it a staple of your diet is akin to living on Mountain Dew and Funyuns. It’s just not sustainable. You gotta eat a salad every now and then.
So, what happened to me? Metaphorically speaking, I learned to like salad. I got older. My tastes changed. I played in a lot of bands. And I started noticing that delicious alchemy that occurs when players change the focus from trying to impress to trying to connect, with one another as well as the listener.
Most of my favorite bands feel like one big collective instrument in and of themselves, each member providing a simple, vital piece of the puzzle that meshes with what the others are playing and makes something undeniably, viscerally communal. The Rolling Stones are the first group that comes to mind. I know you’ve heard it thousands of times already, but listen to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. Or “Gimme Shelter”. Those songs are groove machines, churning away, no one’s playing anything particularly difficult, but take any single element out, and the whole thing would fall apart, or at least be a shadow of itself. Africa 70, fronted by the legendary Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti is another example. Hell, James Brown made The Groove his entire life’s work.
The mighty Fela Anikúlápó Kuti. Approximately 3000% cooler than that kid in the first photo.
In each of those examples, the band members are listening to one another- having a conversation. And that’s a skill that doesn’t come as easily to musicians– especially technically-gifted ones– as one might assume.There’s a temptation to throw your entire education into a performance, but that becomes about as fun to the other musicians as talking to somebody who, instead of processing what you’re telling them, is planning what they’re going to say next when you finally shut up. The longer I do this, the more I become aware that the most essential pieces of gear I have in my rig are the two holes on either side of my head.
When everybody’s listening and the performance becomes a conversation instead of a lecture, the veil is pierced, and the Door opens. Sound becomes music. The audience can always tell when it’s truly cooking. They’ll react accordingly, and the resulting self-sustaining feedback loop is a wondrous, magical thing.
To that point…
I’d rather be known as a good musician than as a good guitarist.
This all makes me think of two of the all-time bonafide wiggy-brilliant eccentrics in modern music: Thelonious Monk, the beloved and deeply quirky jazz composer, pianist and bandleader (to whom the name of my blog gives an affectionate nod and wink), and Don Van Vliet, a childhood friend of Frank Zappa’s who went on to dub himself Captain Beefheart and lead his Magic Band into some truly mindbending places. Monk’s Rules were jotted down by his sax player, Steve Lacy, at a session and, while some are absolute head scratchers (guess you had to be there), some are actually quite profound. Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments are technically aimed at guitarists joining his band, but most of the points can be adapted to other instruments. I’m attaching both lists here for your entertainment and education.
By the way, they're not just for musicians, either. I submit to you the notion that if we all listened more than we spoke, kept our need to show off in check, and embraced the power of substance and connection over artifice, the world might be in a better place.
LET’S LIFT THE BAND STAND.
THELONIOUS MONK’S 25 TIPS FOR MUSICIANS:
Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.
Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.
Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!
Make the drummer sound good.
Discrimination is important.
You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
All reet!
Always know
It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.
Let’s lift the band stand!!
I want to avoid the hecklers.
Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.
Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by. Some music just imagined.
What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.
A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.
When you are swinging, swing some more!
(What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!
Always leave them wanting more.
Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.
Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!
You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART’S TEN COMMANDMENTS OF GUITAR
1. Listen to the birds
“That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.”
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
“Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.”
3. Practice in front of a bush
“Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.”
4. Walk with the devil
“Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the ‘devil box’. And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons.
“Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.”
5. If you’re guilty of thinking, you’re out
“If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.”
6. Never point your guitar at anyone
“Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.”
7. Always carry a church key
“That’s your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He’s one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument.
His song ‘I Need a Hundred Dollars’ is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he’s doing it.”
8. Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument
“You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.”
9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
“When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.”
10. You gotta have a hood for your engine.
“Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.”
THE BALLAD OF BABY GRAND AND MAXIMUM JOY
I’ve been doing this music thing for a long time. Shockingly long, when I really step back and take it in. It’s relative, I know; the Stones and the surviving Beatles have been at it since the dawn of time, Buddy Guy, Ron Carter, and Irma Thomas even longer, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that the lion’s share of the folks I play with and share bills with these days were born after my gigging career had already gotten underway.
I hope these youngsters keep me in their midst out of appreciation and respect. I hope that what I do is relevant enough to allow me to hang, and that I’m not just a mascot or a cautionary tale to them- I’ll never be truly sure. I do know that I sometimes feel like a benevolent cross between Nosferatu and Guy Clark; I enjoy being around their energy and enthusiasm, drawing on the life force of their youth to replenish my own. In return, I try to give good advice when it’s solicited, stay vigilant but discreet, and aim to bring whatever experience I’ve accumulated over the eons to bear when those younger musicians and I make some noise together. That’s what people like Mick Montgomery, Sharon Lane, and Gregg Spence did for me when I was coming up. I try to pay it forward when I can.
Mick, Sharon, and Gregg. I’m sure they’ll appear in a lot of these stories I post. Central, pivotal characters in my life, and all integral parts of Mick’s brainchild, labor of love and, at times, millstone: Canal Street Tavern.
The old Alma Mater.
Canal Street, or simply “Canal”, was a nondescript corner bar in Dayton, Ohio that, even though it no longer exists, will always be my spiritual home and my Mother Church. I’ve waxed rhapsodic at length about that scruffy little dive. If you’ve spent any time at all with me, you’ve heard about that place and, since I have no doubt I’ll be writing at least one longer appreciation piece about it here, I’ll just give you the CliffsNotes rundown this time around:
Canal Street was that rarest beast of all music venues: a listening room. No TVs, no pool tables, no blenders. A rectangular 220-ish-capacity room, with church pews, tables, a couple rows of theatre seats, and an old mojo-infused bar, all facing a smallish stage on the wide wall. Music was the raison d’etre. Over the course of its history, legends graced its stage. Los Lobos. Townes Van Zandt. Ani DiFranco. Phish played to 14 people there one night early in their career. Willie Fucking Dixon played there. Countless others, as well. On the flip side of that coin, terrified kids were able -and encouraged- to play onstage in public for the first time at the weekly Tuesday Musician’s Co-op.
It was, in short, a very, very special place.
Represent.
I foolishly assumed that there was a Canal Street Tavern in every town, until I started traveling and learned how untrue that was. I grew up in that room. I learned how to do what I do there, through Mick’s mentorship and support and easily hundreds of nights on that little stage. Rest his soul. I owe that man everything for the confidence and opportunities he gave me. My band, Shrug, was a big fish in that little pond of Dayton, and we played Canal Street to good-sized crowds every five weeks for well over a decade. There was only one gig Mick offered me that I can remember turning down simply out of fear of being completely eclipsed and, after all this preamble, it’s finally time to get to the band in question at the heart of this story.
Iodine. L to R: Chris Feinstein, Jay Joyce, Brad Pemberton. Hard to find good quality photos online, and I ain’t gettin’ a Facebook account to download these.
I don’t remember who told me about them first, but sometime in 1996 I started hearing folks in the scene (whose musical tastes I trusted unconditionally) speaking in hushed, awed tones about Iodine, a group who had come up from Nashville, played at Canal Street, and just annihilated the place. I took heed and made a note to not miss the next time they swung through.
And so it came to pass one evening that I donned my customary midwestern “rock & roll stevedore” uniform (as my friend Roger Owsley aptly described it)--black beanie, black hoodie, black jeans, and Doc Martens–and sallied forth unto Canal (for probably the third time that week; I should’ve gotten my mail delivered there, considering all the hours I spent there) to witness Iodine’s anxiously-awaited return. It was a triple bill, with Dayton’s surf rock kings the Mulchmen and the infectious, female-fronted punk outfit Real Lulu opening. The aforementioned Gregg Spence would’ve been doing double duty that night, drumming for both bands. The opening sets were great, I’m sure. I was a big fan of both groups. That said, I was a young, relatively unworldly tadpole, musically-speaking, and nothing could’ve prepared me for what came next.
It started with the road cases.
For the uninitiated, road cases are the heavy duty, often wheeled, latching boxes that are always seen piled up backstage in music biopics. I’ve always been enamored by them. I don’t know why- because they’re symbols of professionalism and success, I suppose. They mean 1) that you have some valuable stuff that needs a lot of protection and 2) that you spend a lot of time traveling. I have a few road cases now, and I always look forward to the ritual of stenciling my initials on them. It makes me feel like I mean business, that I’m unfuckwithable. Iodine had an assortment of battle-scarred road cases that told me in no uncertain terms that this band had been around the block more than once and had Seen. Some. Shit.
It continued with the gear inside those cases.
The bassist, Chris “Spacewolf” Feinstein, had a towering Mesa Boogie stack taller than he was- a head and two speaker cabinets, one with two 10” speakers, one with 2 15-inchers. It made my back hurt just looking at it. Chris had a Gibson bass. A Grabber? A Ripper? I can’t remember which, but he looked so cool with it, I immediately wanted one. Brad Pemberton, the drummer, had… I don’t know what. I’m not great at IDing drum kits now, and I knew even less back then. Black, big toms, with an Iodine bumper sticker (a copy of which I made sure I went home with that night) covering the logo on the kick drum. But the guitarist and singer, Jay Joyce, took the cake. He was running a sparkly Gretsch Silver Jet and the ugliest old Antigua “avocado-burst” Fender Telecaster Deluxe I’d ever seen into a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier half stack AND a Matchless DC-30 simultaneously, both set to “stun”, through a board full of pedals best measured in terms of acreage. It was a candy store of equipment up there on that postage stamp of a stage. Iodine hadn’t played a note yet and I was already a fan.
And then they played. Sweet Jesus, did they play.
Upon plugging in, Jay hit a chord that would’ve toppled the walls of Jericho with decibels to spare. It was astonishingly, thrillingly, gloriously loud. Not abrasive; it was a warm, welcoming loud that would draw you to the stage so you could bathe in it. My arm hairs are standing up at the mere memory of it. Among the many toys at Jay’s feet was a Boomerang, an early looper pedal. He played a quick series of chords, tapped a button, and the phrase played back in reverse, repeated, and then repeated again, an organic intro to the onslaught that followed.
The set was a blur, a haze of chorus, echo, reverb, crushing distortion, wild, screaming, over-bent notes. Light and shade. Moments of beauty in between sonic punishment, equal parts The Cure and Motörhead, with Jay’s voice, a unique drawl that gave away his Cleveland roots, world weary, nasal, and gravelly, floating over the top, delivering Bukowski-esque film noir:
San Diego bit me on the nose
Baby, the freaks are all out
Baby, the freaks are all out
Woke up on a ceiling fan
Woke up to a scream
Baby, the freaks are all out
Baby, the freaks are all out
Freeway sombrero
Lost money down in Mexico
Passed out in a red Camaro
Knock knock who’s there
Santa Ana won’t let go
Send it all my way
Come on, Mister
Do me a favor
Gimme what I deserve for my sins
Bury me with her
Bury me with her
Bury me with her
Bury me with her
I know what I’ll do when I get outta jail
Get a razor for my face and a rusty pail
And let the rain fill it up
Like the rain fills it up
Like water
When I was a two eyed boy
I never saw nothin’ but Nimoy
I’m a cyclops now
I’m a cyclops
I’m a cyclops now
I’m a cyclops
I’m a cyclops now
I’m a cyclops now
It was clear that many of the songs were built around Chris Feinstein’s basslines- big, strapping, hooky sonic buttresses that withstood everything the treble clef could throw at it. Brad Pemberton was somehow able to be not only audible over the frontline, but to drive the band through the peaks and valleys on knobby steel belted radials.
But the thing that struck me more than anything–-that made a lasting impression on my still-neophyte musician brain–-was the fact that, from the first downbeat to the end of the rapturous mayhem of the outro guitar solo to “Rosie’s Funeral”, no one in the trio so much as looked at each other. Each song segued into the next with no discernable cues. Little, if any, stage banter. They were one single organism, one vicious machine that made rock and roll. It was the baddest-ass thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to be Iodine when I grew up. I went home with their first CD, Maximum Joy. Aptly named, because that’s what listening to it gave me.
I was almost afraid of them. They gave me no reason to be; Gregg Spence had lots of stories about how nice a bunch of guys they were. They just seemed…bigger than. Bulletproof. Untouchable. And, as I mentioned earlier, when Mick offered Shrug a bill with Iodine (probably envisioning nothing more than a very well-attended show that would help keep the lights on for another month), I had to turn it down. As proud as I was of Shrug, I knew we would’ve had our heads handed to us, sonically speaking. I stand by that decision. But you can bet your ass I was at that show as an audience member.
To the best of my knowledge, I never missed any Iodine show within an hour-or-so radius of Dayton after that first night. Nor did most of the band’s Dayton contingent. I think the guys in Iodine were a little bemused by the rabid loyalty they inspired in the Gem City. For our part, we–the Dayton Iodine Crazies–could never understand why they weren’t huge everywhere they went. I remember seeing them at Top Cat’s in Cincinnati in 1998. They had just released their second album, Baby Grand which, incomprehensibly, was even better than Maximum Joy (side note: I have never learned a band’s lyrics faster or easier than I did with Baby Grand. I had ‘em all down after the second listen). The Dayton Iodine Crazies were up front and center stage at Top Cat’s that night, losing their collective shit as usual while the cooler-than-thou Cincy brats stood in the back with their arms crossed, apparently immune to good music and/or afraid to be caught having fun (another side note: Dayton always had a bit of a chip on its shoulder about its hipper neighbor to the south. My old friend Jim Dwyer used to spit, “It’s like they think they’re fuckin’ PARIS or somethin’!”).
Iodine, like all good things, eventually came to an end, and a bittersweet one, at that. After being criminally overlooked by most of the world, all three of them went on to find success elsewhere. Chris and Brad became the rhythm section for Ryan Adams’ band, the Cardinals. Jay has become a wildly successful Nashville producer, making huge hit records for Keith Urban, Miranda Lambert, Eric Church, the Zac Brown Band, the Brothers Osborne, Cage the Elephant, etc. etc...yeah, Jay’s doin’ pretty alright. Brad’s a Duke nowadays, drumming for Steve Earle, last I heard. Unfortunately, Chris met a tragically early end in 2009, passing away at only 42 from health complications and, according to the coroner, “an adverse reaction to over-the-counter cough medicine”, dashing my (and no doubt the rest of the Dayton Iodine Crazies’) hopes of ever seeing a reunion.
DAMN, they were something. I raise my glass to you, Iodine- especially you, Spacewolf. You gentlemen were a life changing band for me, a vision of what rock & roll could be, what should be, whether the rest of the world saw it or not. Salut.
Now, do me a favor: take these pictures down to the corner. Show ‘em to the Masters. Show ‘em to the Masters. Tell ‘em I sent ya.
Iodine’s two studio albums are, as far as I can tell, long out of print and pretty hard to find. I haven’t been able to find them on any streaming service, either, so I treasure my physical copies of the CDs like the prized possessions they are. You can, however, find both albums on YouTube:
Maximum Joy (1995)
Also, a YouTube user by the name of deenichols has a multipart video of an Iodine show at 328 Performance Hall in Nashville, “Circa 1997?”. It’s nothing like being in the room, I can assure you, but it’s an invaluable bit of history to those who know and remember.
Holy relics. Clearly well-loved.
NINETEEN FOREVER
Scene: April 2020, about a month into the Covid Lockdown.
My wife Patrice, our two cats, and I were living in a tiny one-bedroom, one-bath apartment in Sunnyvale, California. We were scrubbing down our groceries, keeping the non-perishables in the “holding area” (a few cardboard boxes on the living room floor) to quarantine them before putting them in the cupboards. As you do. El oh el. We were all making the rules up as we went.
It was a gloomy spring in the Bay Area. I remember the traffic update signs over a suddenly empty Mathilda Avenue being switched from estimated travel times to the different highways to a simple, stark, unchanging “SHELTER IN PLACE”. Across the street was a complex of Apple office buildings, now deserted, and Patrice and I would go for eerie, quiet walks among them, scowling through our masks at the few living souls we’d encounter who’d entered our (laughably large, in retrospect) bubble of personal space. We were not fucking around in early-Lockdown California; the first untraceable Covid case in the country originated in Santa Clara, just a few miles from where we were living. Things were tense, and nobody in CA was taking any chances. Your state’s mileage may have varied.
Patrice worked for Williams-Sonoma. When her office job suddenly converted to remote, she turned our little bedroom into her office. I took over our breakfast nook, the kitchen table becoming my desk for compiling and recording The Jewel Case, a 3-hour music show I created and hosted for WYSO, the NPR affiliate in Yellow Springs, Ohio at the time. I would drag songs into GarageBand, crossfading them, adding my voiceovers on a third track, and emailing zip files to the station for broadcast on Thursday night. (Side note: it’s an odd feeling, listening to your own radio show, as opposed to doing it live.)
My “office”, Sunnyvale, CA, circa 2020. ‘Bout time to throw out those bananas…
It was, obviously, a horrifying period. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you. Dystopia. Uncertainty. A complete lack of unified leadership on the federal level. A friend of mine kept a computer monitor devoted to tracking the ever-increasing tally of Covid deaths. Patrice and I had the added stress of being 2500 isolated miles away from virtually everyone we knew and loved, watching helplessly as our our native Ohio seemed (from our hypervigilant vantage point, at least) to be treating common-sense health and public safety policies as half-joking suggestions.
Shit was dark.
And yet…
And yet…
If I’m really being honest, there’s a part of me that looks back on that period with…well, ”fondness” isn’t the right word; I know far too many folks who experienced devastating trauma and tragedy. But if I can separate my personal corner of it from the horrors of what the world as a whole was going through, there’s an almost nostalgic flavor to the way I think of those days. We were fortunate that Patrice still had her job. Money was still coming in (a lot of people weren’t so lucky). The notorious Bay Area traffic was down to a trickle (One could get from Sunnyvale to San Fransisco in well under an hour), and the air got quieter and clearer. And -crucially- the introvert in me really enjoyed the lack of social obligation. I’ve always gravitated to solitary pursuits and, when I wasn’t working on my radio show or watching Chernobyl on Netflix (GREAT choice of escapism there, Tod), I was finally getting time to learn my way around GarageBand, writing songs for my next chapter as a solo musician.
At the time, I had just moved west and left behind Shrug, my band of brothers with whom I’d had a 26-year run in Dayton, Ohio. I had also been playing with the Motel Beds, John Dubuc and the Guilty Pleasures, and literally dozens of other past projects, stretching back into the early 90s. And, while I had regularly sprinkled a lot of acoustic solo sets into my schedule, I had always been a band guy. I’ve heard many different musicians refer to bands, especially young bands, as gangs. I could relate. I was not an athlete, so I didn’t have the experience of a life of being on teams; I got my version of that in the scruffier, less organized, more dysfunctional rituals of a bunch of friends in smelly rooms and vans, pouring all of my confusion, anger, joy, and ambition into making a racket for a roomful of likeminded believers. It’s good work if you can get it.
And so it came to pass that, in those early uncertain days of Covid, I sat at my little kitchen table-turned-”studio”, pondering a course for my new solo career, remembering past glories and indignities, and pondering if I’d ever get to do any of that stuff again. Words started coming:
Busting out of the cornfields and factory towns
Twice as good as you’d think and just as bad as it sounds
May I present to you the four musketeers
A little bit too pie-eyed and wet behind the ears
A little older than their guitars
And quite a bit younger than their years
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
Place your bets and put your money down
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
These kids are always gonna be around
They pooled their pizza tips, a Prehistori-conoline Ford
Coughin’ down the highway and preachin’ on three truths and a chord
Three drink tickets and a percentage of the door
Opening for someone you never heard of before
Doesn’t matter if you’re out of gas
and crashing on some local kid’s floor
The boys are back in town
Spread the word around
They were hard as nails and sharp as a knife
Then the drummer found himself a job and a wife
The other three are hooked now, man
They’re in this for life- what a life
What a life
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
Place your bets and put your money down
Nineteen forever
Nineteen forever
These kids are always gonna be around
The music started as a kind of shuffle, not light years from the stuff we used to do in the Motel Beds but, as it went on, it began to take on more and more of a Thin Lizzy vibe. Normally when this situation presents itself I try to steer the song in another direction. But this one caught me in a nostalgic mood, and I decided to lean into the Lizziness, with guitar harmonies, my best approximation of Phil Lynott’s delivery, and a couple small cases of outright petty lyrical larceny.
It’s very crude (bear in mind, I was early in my Garageband journey), but a lot of fun.
You can hear it by clicking here, if you want. I’d like that.
TOO MUCH MACHINE
So, I guess this is a blog. Welcome to my blog. Let’s get bloggin’.
I’m putting these posts under the same moniker as my mostly dormant Substack account. I had high hopes for that platform, but got kind of disenchanted with it as I watched it slowly, inevitably turn into yet another version of Facebook, with a bunch of reposted videos, echo chambers, and such. I don’t really have a plan here, beyond trying (trying, mind you) to make whatever this is a weekly thing, and to give you something to read on a regular basis- disjointed, garbled, and scattershot as it’s bound to be. I have a lot of noise in my head, but I can make an educated guess that these posts will be touching on a lot of music and art, songwriting, maybe some essays, scattered fiction, half-baked (but passionate) socio-political diatribes, more navel gazing than is probably necessary (or healthy), and general gobbledygook. It’s also entirely possible that the occasional balderdash, falderal, and poppycock will surface. No promises, falderal fans. Let’s just see what happens, shall we? Hell, I’m just glad you’re here.
Happy Year of the Horse, everyone. Here’s hoping that new, magnificent beast finds you with your saddle, ready for the ride ahead. I’m no expert on Chinese Lunar Years but, as I understand it, this new one is all about change; shuffling off that which doesn’t serve you, ditching baggage, and entering a new period of creativity and enlightenment.
That last part sounds pretty damn good to me, as it no doubt does to all folks who consider themselves “artistic types”. The middle part about shuffling and ditching does, too, because I’m tracking in a fair amount of mud on my boots from the Year of the Snake (more on that in a bit). It’s that first part, the “change” bit, that has me a little shook.
Call it my Midwestern Anglo-Saxon upbringing, blame it on my Zodiac sign or my generally undramatic middle class childhood, blame it on the bossa nova, but I’ve not, as a general rule, been a big fan of change. I like stability. I like dependability. I don’t care for chaos. And, seeing as how chaos is the coin of the goddamned realm these days, you can probably guess how my last year or so has been going.
And I’m betting that you’ve been feeling it, too- the vertigo that comes with non-stop outrage, existential dread, and the ever-expanding awareness that our entire reality has been built on radioactive sand with scotch tape and snake oil by a cabal of soulless, morally-bankrupt, power-hungry, pedophilic monsters with more money than they could ever possibly need and an apparent immunity to consequences. For over a year now, I’ve not really felt like myself. It’s as if I’ve been on crazy pills and, while a bit of Machine to rage against is useful to an empathetic, creative person, too much Machine can be exhausting and paralyzing. And that’s pretty much where you can usually find me lately: on the corner of Exhausted and Paralyzed. As a result, I feel like a traitor to my chosen vocation; at a time when I should be churning out art at a furious clip, I wrote exactly one (kind of shitty) song, in November, just squeaking in under the wire of a year that should have been a goldmine of righteous inspiration.
Then, in December, my father passed away at 96, after a long struggle with dementia. Watching the kind, brilliant man I knew and loved slowly disappear over a decade and grappling with the concept of grieving someone we essentially lost years ago dropped a final, rotten cherry on top of the already very Emo sundae that 2025 had become. As such, I’ve been vacillating between “too many feelings’ and “dead inside” with alarming and dismaying regularity.
Jesus. This post has taken a turn. Again.
Confession: this is actually my second attempt at writing this piece, and I keep ending up in this dark neighborhood. But you know what? I’m gonna lean into it. I’m not writing this to vent (OK, maybe a little, but not just to vent, anyway). I’m writing this for the same reason most of my songs skew a bit towards gloom. Once upon a time, when I was spinning out about the general lack of mirth in my music, my wife, who is smarter than I’ll ever be and an expert at talking me off the ledge, told me, “your music makes people feel less alone.” It was a good and overdue reframing of what I had, up until then, considered a weakness. Don’t be ashamed of or embarrassed about your dark side. We all have one, and it can be useful. Toxic positivity divorces us from reality. If you’re feeling bad, it means you still care; you still believe that things can be better than they are. We just have to find a way to keep what everyone from Horace to Winston Churchill to Nick Drake called “the Black Dog” on a leash.
Writing and playing music is my main way of controlling that dog, and by far the most dependable one. Traditional clinical therapy is problematic for me. I know it works for a lot of folks, and I’ve done it myself, and it felt..alright, I guess. But I can’t shake the feeling that I already know what I need to do going into it, that everything the therapist is going to tell me is basic common sense, and that I’m wasting both parties’ time. I know it’s a cyclical thing for me, and I just need to ride it out, while trying not to cause harm or stress to those around me. Overthinking? Underthinking? Cop out? I don’t know. Ugh. Brains, amirite?
Your world, your reality, is a suit. You put it on. It’s a baseline, generally comfortable enough to function in, a bit restrictive in its tailoring, but you make it work. Over time, it gets threadbare. It doesn’t fit right. It falls out of fashion. The powers that be tell you that a new suit is too expensive, your old suit is the one you have to wear, and that everything will fall apart if you change it. Fuck that. This suit sucks. It’s started to smell, and it doesn’t serve us anymore. It’s time to go shopping. I’m not really talking about suits.
As for me, I’ve got my eye on a new suit for 2026. It’s simple, timeless. Understated, but well-made. Sharp, but functional. It’s a little pricey, but everything worth the trouble is. And it’s a change, something I’m trying to get better about embracing.
Oh- and it’s a good suit for riding, I’m told.
Giddyup.