I’m making some changes to the this blog. So for the time being I have unpublished all these posts. I’ll put them back on line as we go through them. thanks.

You can also visit me at http://www.trichordist.com

I am on the fucking warpath this week.

Lamest arguments in favor of illegal file sharing from the past week. I’m not making this shit up. These are real arguments people presented. And argued vehemently.

1. “Marijuana is illegal. File sharing is illegal. Therefore it’s okay.”

Response try filesharing your pot dealer’s stash with 5,000 strangers online and let’s see how long you live.

2. “The RIAA is secretly behind filesharing. They make more money suing people than by selling albums. There are Youtube videos explaining all this therefore it’s true. Therefore it’s okay to steal from cracker and camper van beethoven”

Response: The RIAA was also behind 9-11, Global Warming Hoax and the Kennedy assassinations. Usher is behind Justin Bieber. And Camper Van Beethoven tests cosmetics on lab animals.

3. I heard that the record companies ripped off Willy Dixon in the 1950′s Therefore it’s okay to steal from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven.

Response: Very clever. You figured out that Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have a time machine. We all went back in time to the 1950′s (before we were born) and took $20 dollars from the man’s wallet while he was sleeping. Curses Foiled again.

4. Louis CK. Is successful and his stuff is on Youtube. Therefore it’s okay to steal Cracker’s songs.

Response ask Louis CK if he would prefer his income stream or his idol George Carlin’s Income stream from album sales, video sales, book sales in the 1970′s and 1980′s. Louis CK is making a lot of money. But nothing like George Carlin. And in the process he is helping Google/Youtube add to the piles of gold bullion that Google keeps in secret spaceship deep inside the mantle of the earth below their mountain view “campus”.

5. Music should be free it belongs to the universe.

Response: Okay then come to my house and do YOUR job for free. My car needs it’s oil changed and someone needs to pick up the dogshit in the backyard. There is a signup list on our website. Last i checked my car and the dogshit also “belonged to the universe”.

6. In the middle ages there were no music sales. It was all based on live performance.

Response: Yes and doctors bled you or covered your torso with leaches when you were sick. Also it was permissible to beat your wife with a stick as long as the stick was not larger in diameter than your thumb .

7. “Music sucks today. I’m gonna steal music I like. You bad. No No.”

Response: There is no official response. We have been advised by our legal counsel that the above referenced statement exhibits such a degree of logical incoherence that the statement:
A) was made by a mentally disabled individual
B) are lyrics to a Red Hot Chili Peppers song
C) A zen koan created by a zen master operating on a higher level of consciousness
D) or any two of the above three.

8. “You’re not the boss of me. You can’t tell me what to do”

Response: Actually I personally am the boss of you. Check with your attorney. Unless you are in international waters. Now get out in the backyard and clean up the dog shit.

9. “The Record labels and Musicians failed to adapt to the new hi tech reality. So it’s okay to steal music by Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven”.

Response: So it’s okay to steal handmade boots, organically grown farm produce from family farms, and custom motorcycles? You’re right I’ve been stealing custom choppers for years. How stupid of me. You win.

10. “It’s okay to steal from musicians cause they are all rich”

Response: Although I am dictating this into my solid gold jewel encrusted dictaphone from horseback I’m not rich. Now Steve Jobs he was rich. You know he was buried in a 300 yard long platinum coffin along with 50,000 of his favorite servants? A funeral procession 66 miles long stretched from Vacaville California to Mountain View. Thousand of Buddhist monks burned themselves alive. I’m not rich.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A lot of you may be shocked by this response. But should you really be surprised? I mean i’ve spent 29 years making music for people who think the world is full of a lot of unadulterated bullshit and can see the humor in it. Have a sense of humor people.

19 No More Bullshit

Ted Kaczynski’s Santa Cruz vacation shack.

04 Lulu Land

In 1982 I lived in the tiniest house imaginable. It was at most 400 square feet yet it boasted a kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms. My bedroom was 6 x 10 feet. big enough for for a single mattress on a small platform. The small closet could hold about a ˝ a dozen shirts, a couple of jackets and a sweater or two. I rolled up four or five pairs of jeans and stuffed them onto the shelf at the top of the closet. The rest of my clothes I kept in a suitcase that I slid out from under my bed when I needed it. This is where I also kept my guitars. I had two plastic beer crates. I stacked these on the floor one on top of each other. I kept a few books, a couple of writing journals and my supply of cassettes for my cassette recorder. The cassette recorder was on the top of the stack. In the corner I kept a small fender amp. A Fender super champ that somebody with excellent cabinetry skills had reworked into a separated ?head? and speaker cabinet. This was my songwriting workstation.

I can?t remember if the living room had any furniture in it. I know we had my roommate?s stereo in there and one wall was filled with our vinyl collections. The other side of the living room had a couple of guitar amplifiers, my full size SVT and some miscellaneous drum kit parts. I can?t imagine there was any room for any furniture. Plus I can not recall ever once sitting in that room.

The house was part of a collection of a dozen beach cottages crammed into the parking lot of the Santa Cruz beach amusement park. These were originally meant to be summer rentals. But this was during Santa Cruz?s deep nadir in popularity. Air travel had rendered Santa Cruz?s oceanfront irrelevant to the Bay Area?s middle class. Yes there were tourists on the weekend but they were a decidedly working class and rowdy lot.

This area was called Beach Flats. It was really just a sand bar barely above sea level. It was protected from the San Lorenzo river by a 12 foot levee. Aside from a few students living here the area was populated by Spanish speaking immigrants. Most worked in the local restaurants. Everything about the place suggested impermanence and transience.

In the summer it was occupied land. A foreign army of daytrippers from San Jose, Milpitas, Watsonville and Fremont encamped upon these shores. Their River?s Edge Baja Bugs, Low Riders and tricked out pickup trucks were like the chariot armies of Carthaginians to our Roman sensibilities. Thus we avoided their beachhead.

But most of the time, especially in the winter, it was a lonely outpost from the rest of the city. The city bus neglected the area and it always required a lonely and dark walk along the top of the river levee. Alternately you could walk across a small pedestrian bridge attached to the railroad trestle that spanned the San Lorenzo just as it emptied into the ocean.

During heavy rains directly below the bridge there was a violent mixing of river current and storm driven waves. If you fell into this you would surely drown. I?d often encounter neighborhood youth smoking pot or drinking beer on this bridge late in the evening. They stared at me warily. Their alliances were uncertain. I never knew if we were friend or foe. On many occasion I imagined they might throw me off the bridge just for their own amusement. For this reason I often carried my all aluminum Ultraflex skateboard. I rarely rode it, but both tail and nose were worn down into a sharp edge. It was like a 30? Celtic sword with urethane wheels.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Corry Arnold defines a music scene as a neighborhood or city that is a ?net exporter of concerts?. In other words

Let A = the number of concerts performed by the bands in a scene outside their neighborhood or city X.

Let B = the number of concerts performed by outsiders within that neighborhood or city.

City or neighborhood X is a music scene If and only if A> B.

By this definition I?d say that Santa Cruz (barely) qualified as a music scene in 1982.

Arnold also notes music scenes rely on low property values in particular transitional neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that had once had another purpose but now had fallen out of primary use. Cheap space and a tolerance for noise are important commodities for bands.

You could argue that the old beach rentals along the lower end of Ocean street and the neighborhoods clustered around the old harbor qualified as in transition. Too seedy and rundown for beach rentals these houses were subsequently occupied by the more adventurous. Arty students, musicians and other slackers now occupied many of these cottages.

But our cottage was effectively cut off from these neighborhoods by the river levee. In retrospect I now see it was very Dungeons and Dragonsish of the locals to refer to the homeless population that slept in hideaways along the river as ?trolls?. Indeed walking to my house at night I learned to steer clear of these trolls as many were quite aggressive or totally insane. You definitely felt penalized after unexpectedly making contact with these folks.

But the isolation was very good for a couple young mathematicians and songwriters. I was able to really dive into the most difficult proofs and songs in that cottage. Later when I moved to a better part of town I found that I had to go to the science library to get any deep thinking done.

My roommate was also a mathematician and songwriter. His name was Paul MacKinney. Recognize that name? We covered one of his songs on the 3^rd Camper Van Beethoven Album. The song is LuLu Land. We also named our CVB fan club after him. The Paul MacKinney Fan Club. People were completely mystified as to why the Camper Van Beethoven fan club was named The Paul MacKinney Fan Club. Paul was also mystified. As always CVB was Inscrutable.

I?m not really sure what Paul had in mind when he wrote Lulu Land but in my mind I always associated it with that walk along the river levee. An unplanned conversation with one of the sad crazies was surely the root of this song! But who knows.

Also it should be noted that Paul, Joe Sloan (of Spot 1019) and I had a short lived band about this time called The Jaws of Life. It was actually during this time that I began performing the Black Flag song ?wasted?. This was later carried over into Camper Van Beethoven?s repertoire.

Paul would often finish his math homework well before me. He?d come into my room and hover. Or he?d try to help me with whatever proof or problem I was working on. Once I was finished he?d celebrate by handing me a PBR (or joint). and dropping the needle on his well worn copy of Black Flag?s Nervous Breakdown EP. Wasted was one of the songs on the B side. We became fixated on the simple genius of the 40 second song. How could we not cover it?

03 Wasted

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Beach Flats makes another small appearance in a Cracker song. Once I moved to the eastside of Santa Cruz I rarely went back to this neighborhood. Except to go bowling. Go figure.

Boardwalk Bowl (I remember it as Surf Bowl-anyone else?) was on the western edge of Beach Flats. Right where the land began to slope up and become Beach Hills. To be accurate it should be noted that the cheap beer was more of an attraction than the actual bowling. This and the two old dive bars The Asti Café and the Avenue were for a long time my usual hangouts in Santa Cruz.

But one day my girlfriend Jennifer (see fear and loathing in Las Vegas #….) ruined it for all of us. She had become fixated on the bowling shoes at the Surf Bowl. She wanted her own pair but the ones that were available commercially were nothing like surf bowls cool retro beauties. So one day she just walks out with a pair on.

When I discovered this I was quite mad. Because we were regulars and she was quite the beauty. There was no way the middle aged men who worked in the bowling alley would not remember us. No more Surf Bowl. All for a pair of shoes.

So in Surf City 85 I sing.

Surf City

Then you stole some bowling shoes

What a pathetic criminal you.

What a pathetic criminal

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lulu Land- (Paul MacKinney)

[Am] Pictures of [C] movie stars [D] fade and grow old
[Am] The hot dogs and [C] pretzels are [D] always served cold
[Am] Take nothing [C] with you when you [D] leave but your soul
In [E] Lulu Land

How can you lose when you choose what you feel?
The scab will fall off when the wound starts to heal
Luck’s on your side and it’s your turn to deal
In Lulu Land

In [F#m] Lulu land, the [G] walls are soft and [F#m] dark
In Lulu [G] land, the secret [F#m] heart
is in com-[G]-mand in Lulu [E] Land

How can you lose when you live in the past?
Nothing can happen that happens too fast
Live is a furnace and love is the blast
In Lulu Land

Where innocent promises turn into bad debts
Where things that you do you live to regret
Your life is a movie and the world is a set
In Lulu Land

In Lulu land, the wall are soft and dark
In Lulu land, the secret heart
is in command in Lulu Land

[C#dim]-[Cdim]-[C#dim]-[Cdim]-[B]-[A#m]-[Am]-[G]

[Am]-[C]-[D]
[Am]-[C]-[D]
[Am]-[C]-[D] [E]
[F#m]-[G]
[F#m]-[G]
[F#m]-[G]
[E]

Surf City 85
[INTRO x2 (also: chords for verses):]
[Am] [Dm] [F] [G] [Am]

Schoolgirls walking down the street
In schoolgirl uniforms
There’s a sadness at
The centre of the world

Well days they seem to drift away
I don’t know where they go
There’s a sadness at
The centre of the world

[CHORUS:]
So [G] come pick me up
At the tea cup
We’ll go [Am] down the seaside lanes [F]
We’ll watch the [C] girls
[F] We’ll bowl a few [C] games

Nothing to do
But there’s the red room
Then you stole some bowling shoes
What a pathetic criminal you
What a pathetic criminal

Blair and goldie on the sand
It’s raining in the surf
Well that’s nothing lost
And nothing gained today

They tried to go their separate ways
But all roads circle back
Well that’s nothing lost
And nothing gained today

[CHORUS:]
So come pick me up
At the tea cup
We’ll go down the Asti Café
We’ll watch the girls
Just like every Saturday

Nothing to do
Ride out to Bonnie Doon
We thought she had it made
But you crashed your bike on ice-cream grade
And then you were dead

[KEYBOARD SOLO then GUITAR SOLO (chords as INTRO)]

02 The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon

Camper Van Beethoven was originally called Camper Van Beethoven and the Border Patrol. We shortened it after about 9 months. Nobody was listing the full name of the band anyway. There are only two or three posters that I’ve ever seen that show the full name of the band. But this was the original name of the band.

The band name was the brainchild of David McDaniel. David pictured above (in the bowling shirt) had an odd sense of humor. At the time we formed Camper Van Beethoven he was also working on this sort of stand up comedy routine that involved these carefully constructed “jokes”. they had all the rhyme and rhythm of a joke but made no sense. I only remember one. And it was intended to be delivered with a sort of generic foreign accent.

“My country, where I come from is SO SMALL! SO SMALL that when they change the tire everybody laughs”

The next joke might not have the foreign accent. There was no coherence to the character. They were like computer generated one-liners read by randomly selected people.

So Camper Van Beethoven and the Border Patrol was in the same vein. It sounded like it was supposed to make sense or be a pun. It had the rhyme and rhythm but it fell short. And it also kind of wandered off on a tangent. Still it somehow evoked the bands music.

David McDaniel was also the spiritual leader of the band. Literally. He was just beginning his studies to become a Pastor. I’m not quite sure what denomination. Just that it was somehow in the Charismatic branch of American Christianity. Charismatic? Best explained by one of my friend’s very Mexican American Catholic mother:

“I think they are snakehandlers”.

If you are uncomfortable with Mrs Gonzales’ definition, how ’bout the one from wikipedia:

The term charismatic movement is used in varying senses to describe 20th century developments in various Christian denominations. It describes an ongoing international, cross-denominational/non-denominational Christian movement in which individual, historically mainstream congregations adopt beliefs and practices similar to Pentecostals. Foundational to the movement is the belief that Christians may be “filled with” or “baptized in” the Holy Spirit as a second experience subsequent to salvation and that it will be evidenced by manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Among Protestants, the movement began around 1960. Among Roman Catholics, it originated around 1967.

For you Europeans who are unfamiliar with pentecostals, they are known for celebrating baptism in the holy spirit. This can include speaking in tongues, ecstatic dancing and yes, Mrs Gonzales, snakehandling.

Some of you might be surprised that a devoutly religious young man was one of the founding members of Camper Van Beethoven. Or perhaps it makes sense. I mean California was home to people like Lonnie Frisbee and the whole Jesus Freaks movement. In the 70′s a lot of these Charismatics came out of the counter-culture movement. So David wasn’t really a Jesus Freak. No, he had to much new wave post punk awareness. A Jesus Punk?

Lonnie Frisbee in a Camper Van Beethoven promotional Tunic.

It’s nothing we really thought about very much. Except maybe once. As Victor Krummenacher, Chris Molla and myself pulled up stakes and decided to move Camper Van Beethoven from Redlands (in the Inland Empire) to Santa Cruz we asked David if he was gonna come along with us. He really looked at us like we were crazy. No he was gonna become a pastor. And that is indeed what he did.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

David was only in the band for three or four months but he left his mark on the band. He co-wrote and sang The Day Lassie Went To The Moon. The early rehearsal tape I posted here last summer in #23 has a version of Lassie with David McDaniel singing.

http://300songs.com/2010/08/09/23-ms-santa-cruz-county-cracker-who-were-the-blue-ladies-ode-to-santa-cruz/

1983 Camper van beethoven rehearsal

The lyrics to this song very much set the tone for most of the early Camper Van Beethoven albums. Light and happy but somehow deeply warped. Like a subversive children’s song. We repeatedly re-used this voice.

Final note on Lassie. The chorus chord progression must have been unconsciously lifted from Wall of Voodoo’s version of Ring of Fire. (we listened to a lot of Wall of Voodoo ). The riff begins at 3:13

The Day That Lassie Went to the moon.
 . E A D A e|| -----------------|---2------------- || B|| ---0-------2-----|-----3-----2----- || G||.-----1-------2---|-------2-----2---.|| D||.-------2-------2-|-0-------------2-.|| A|| ---------0-------|---------0------- || E|| -0---------------|----------------- || 

[INTRO & BREAK (see tab)]
[E]-[A]-[D]-[A]
[E]-[A]-[D]-[A]

[REPEAT BREAK]

[E] My little [A] dog [D] ran away the [A] other day [E] (yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah, [D] yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah)
[E] I can’t be-[A]-lieve my little dog [D] Lassie ra-[A]-an a-[E]-way (yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah, [D] yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah)
[E] She packed her [A] bags and [D] got into a [A] hot-air bal-[E]-loon (yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah, [D] yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah)
[E] Then my little dog [A] Lassie, she [D] sailed [A] off to the mo-[E]-on (yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah, [D] yeah ye-[A]-eah yeah yeah)

CHORUS:
[E]-[B]-[Bb] The day
[F#]-[A]-[G] the day
[E] That was the [Bb] day that [F#] Lassie [A]went to the [E] moon

My little dog Lassie packed her bags and went out onto the porch
Her golden fur glistened in that sunny blue backdrop sky of Kansas
Before her stretched majestic wheat fields and over to that great city to the west
Lassie knew she had the duty to serve the youth of America and the stars above

REPEAT CHORUS x3

Giant Dipper. The Roller Coaster of Love.

03 Big Dipper Click here to play big dipper.

This is an interview I did with KQED for The California Report. As part of their California Songs series they ask me about Big Dipper. So todays blog is simply the audio recording of that interview.

http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201107151630/d

The wooden roller coaster on the Santa Cruz boardwalk is a magnet for families, kids and teenagers on dates. It also inspired musician David Lowery’s song “Big Dipper.” Lowery studied mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, and “Big Dipper” appears on the album titled “The Golden Age” released in 1996 with his band Cracker. Lowery tells us the story behind the music.

Here is the short version as it was broadcast:

KQED California Songs David Lowery/Big Dipper

: Am  .   C   .     F .     G       .     Am  . C   . F       .       G .
e|--------0---1-0--|----1p0-----------0h1|0-----0----|--------------------|
B|----1-3---1-----1|--------0h1-3-1-3----|-----------|----0h1-3-1-0-------|
G|--2--------------|---------------------|--2-----0--|--2-----------2-0---|
D|-----------------|---------------------|-----------|3-------------------|

[SECTION 1 (see tab):]
[Am]-[C]-[F]-[G(sus4)]

[Am] Cigarette [C] and carrot juice [F]-[G(sus4)]
And get yourself a [Am] new tattoo [C] for those sleeveless [F] days of [G(sus4)] June

I’m sitting on the Cafe Xeno’s steps with a book I haven’t started yet
watching all the girls walk by

Could I take you [F] out
I’ll be yours without a [Dm] doubt
[C] on that big [G(sus4)] dipper

And if the sound of this it frightens you
we could play it real cool
and act somewhat indifferent

And hey June why did you have to come, why did you have to come around so soon
I wasn’t ready for all this nature

The terrible green green grass, and violent blooms of flowered dresses
and afternoons that make me sleepy

But we could wait awhile
before we push that dull turnstile
into the passage

The thousands they had tread
and others sometimes fled
before their turn came

[REPEAT SECTION 1 x2]

And we could wait our lives
before a chance arrives
before the passage

From the top you can see Monterey
or think about San Jose
though I know it’s not that pleasant

And hey Jim Kerouac brother of the famous Jack
or so he likes to say “lucky bastard”

He’s sitting on the cafe Xeno’s steps with a girl I’m not over yet
watching all the world go by

Boy you are looking bad
Did I make you feel that sad
I’m honestly flattered

But if she asks me out
I’ll be hers without a doubt
on that big dipper

Cigarettes and carrot juice
and get yourself a new tattoo for those sleeveless days of June

I’m sitting on the cafe Xeno’s steps
I haven’t got the courage yet, I haven’t got the courage yet,

I haven’t got the [ending Am] courage yet

12 Take The Skinheads Bowling (click to play)

I’ve mentioned this before. Success in the music business is completely unpredictable. No one can really predict which artists will end up being successful. No one can really predict which song or album will be a hit. And a lot of times the songs, albums or artists that become the really big smash hits seem to just come out of the blue. They are often surprises to the record labels and artists themselves. The smaller hits and the minor hits seem almost predictable by comparison. The really big hits are truly outliers.

In technical terms these smash hits are Black Swans. Further there appears to be a distinct lack of causality. By this I mean, spending money on radio promotion, publicity, advertising, production, videos etc etc seems to be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Sure it’s unlikely that a band with no budget or promotional push behind them is gonna be a massive hit. But having a million dollar promotional budget and the full might of Warner Music Group behind a band doesn’t guarantee success. Money might sometimes be a necessary condition but it is not sufficient.In fact it leads to success in perhaps 1 in 10 cases.*

Sadly talent is overrated. Yes there are very talented artists and songwriters. While talent is a subjective quality there are clearly artists that we all seem to agree have talent. We can be objective and say they have talent. And to be sure these talented artists always have a much better chance of becoming stars. They have a much better chance of having hit songs, multi-platinum albums and large crowds at the their shows. But it is not guaranteed. In fact most “talented” artists do not become stars. T They toil in obscurity until they finally give up or become too old to be marketable. Its just a lucky few that make it. And it is luck.

And the opposite is also true. Sometimes fairly untalented artists have big hits. Sometimes it’s the strange one hit wonders like Right Said Fred. Other times fairly untalented artists can have long and successful careers. Take for instance Kid Rock. This is not a jab. I believe there exists a scientific proof that can establish that Kid Rock is fairly untalented. I’m just stating facts. I have a feeling that Kid Rock might admit that he is fairly untalented and extremely lucky.

Talent is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success.

ab

It’s not that there really is no rhyme or reason to an artist’s success. It’s not really random. It’s just that the process of making a hit or a star is irreducibly complex,unpredictable and impossible to model. It can never be duplicated. What worked for one artist doesn’t work for the next artist. All we can say is that empirically the secret alchemist formula for success has little to do with money, clout or talent. These seem to lead to only marginal improvements in total sales. And this is usually only once an act or a song has already generated some success on it’s own.

Yet everyone in the music business seems to think otherwise. Artists, managers, agents and record executives will argue otherwise. They will cite their own personal narratives that show how their actions and decisions led to some spectacular success. But there are always a few strange logical fallacies at work.

“Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan”- arab proverb.

What this means is not that a successful project has many fathers helping to guide it on it’s way to success. No, this means that many people claim to be associated or responsible for a project’s success no matter how tenuous. People play up their role in a successful project but downplay their role or completely disavow involvement in failures and disasters. It’s a genetically encoded survival feature of Homo Corporaticus. By doing this people artificially increase their win/loss ratio. Equity traders would say they fraudulently increase their alpha or skill quotient.

This also helps create an illusion of causality. It helps us tell ourselves and others the lie that our actions decisions and theories usually result in great success. There’s also something called the narrative fallacy whereby an individual will look back on events and select a cause and effect narrative that brings order to what were really chaotic and random events and decisions.

For instance Quincy Jones might naturally and understandably think that his production of Thriller was the most important and consequential narrative in the unprecedented success of this album (100 million worldwide best selling album of all time). When in actuality totally unrelated seemingly random developments and events were likely greater factors:

1. A burgeoning middle class in the developing world that identified with american Soul and R & B.

2. satellite television that distributed american music videos worldwide

3. the guest guitar solo by Edie Van Halen onBeat it suddenly made it okay for white suburban kids to listen to Michael Jackson etc etc.

I’m skipping a few things here but in short we lie to ourselves not because we are bad or evil, it’s just seems we can not function comfortably with a universe that is chaotic and unpredictable. We need to make sense of the world in a way that comforts and soothes us.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I teach a class at University of Georgia about the music business. As part of the class I like to give the students a sort of proof by contradiction that outcomes in the music business can not be reliably duplicated and are highly unpredictable. Here’s how it goes:

Suppose that the music business is perfectly rational and predictable. If that’s the case you could design a Hit Machine that models the music business. For example if you put inputs X Y and Z into the machine you get a predictable volume of sales or revenue out of the other end of the Hit Machine. Every time. No Variation.

For example suppose for each album

we spend exactly the same amount on advertising.

We use exactly the same radio promoters.

We use exactly the same publicity firm.

We give the band the same amount of tour support.

They play the same number of shows in exactly the same venues.

The recording and video budgets are exactly the same.

We even use the same creatives: record producer, engineer, video director, songwriting team and studio musicians.

We spend the same amount on Black Ops: strippers, hookers, drugs and payola.

The list goes on and on.

If there were a hit machine we would get the same result each time. The exact same sales. Each album generates the same revenue.

For each album, the exact same inputs (left) produce the exact same number of sales (right).

Of course we know this is absurd. No one would really expect this to happen. We reasonably expect there to be variation in sales for each successive albums. No matter how firmly we control the inputs to the machine. There are just too many other variables. The songwriter is off his/her game on one song. Global cultural tastes change. Current events make a song’s subject less or more engaging… etc etc.

So let’s redesign our Hit machine. We introduce some variation. A little randomness or pseudo randomness. Now we get something that seems more reasonable. If we put exactly the same “inputs” into the machine for each album you get varying sales out of the machine. In this case you get what mathematicians and statisticians call a “normal” or “gaussian” distribution.

The Exact same inputs (left) produce a normal variation in sales (right).

But as it turns out we know a lot about the variation in album sales. Album sales do not vary in this “normal” or “gaussian” way. They vary “wildly”.***

And here wild is actually a real mathematical term. So if there is a hit machine it would have to generate wild variation in sales with the same inputs.****

Like this:

I’m skipping a few logical steps here but basically the conclusion is that the “inputs” to the hit machine – those things that the artists, managers, record labels, agents and songwriters have control over – have only a marginal effect on the end result. So marginal they are pretty much irrelevant. And if the cumulative actions of managers, labels, agents, artists, songwriters, producers and video directors have only a marginal influence on the outcome then it’s fair to say success in the music business is due to luck. or success in the music business is random or unpredictable. Q.E.D. sort of…

To use Michael Jackson as an example again off the wall had pretty much the same inputs as Thriller. Yet the results were wildly dfferent. 2 million vs 100 million. Or in gross revenue terms 16 million versus 800 million. You could plausibly argue with a straight face that $16 million dollars of Thriller was due to skill and $784 million dollars was the result of luck. I know this is an oversimplification but it still illustrates my point that most of the profit in the music business is not due to skill, talent or expertise.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This fractal design is “self similar” Each smaller piece is exactly the same shape as the whole.

While similar to fractals this is something mathematicians call a “Dork”.

Another important fact. This “wild” variation in sales of albums or songs is also Self-Similar. By this I mean that no matter how you slice and dice the sales data, no matter which subset of albums or songs you might create you still get a wild distribution.

For example if you look at the subset of just Camper Van Beethoven songs. And you look at the revenue generated by each song, you get what appears to be a wild distribution. It doesn’t matter whether you look at one quarter’s income or the lifetime cumulative income the distribution appears to be wild.

But I doubt that it is just Camper Van Beethoven. I don’t know for sure but I suspect that in the sub-genre of black metal, that if you looked at income for every album in the genre you would get a wild distribution. I suspect the same for the Narco-corridos sub genre.

This is Self-Similarity. Without going into it in detail- I don’t want to make your brain explode- everywhere that you have wild distributions you usually find Black Swans Events. And in the music business these Black Swan Events are the Hits. Camper Van Beethoven’s Black Swan Event was Take the Skinheads Bowling.

********************************************

CVB writing a smash hit in 1984. The guy in the hat was not visible to the naked eye. He was only visible using certain film and special cameras (Usually KODAK EKTACHROME 160T). He is a minor demon of the Santa Catalina class. We would often accidentally conjure him during moments of intense creativity. He told us his name was “doobie”.

Honestly in 1984 I never thought that much about the song Take The Skinheads Bowling. It was part of our repertoire but it wasn’t like people talked about this song much after the show. If they did talk about it they didn’t talk about it anymore than the other songs.

I don’t think it was until after we recorded our demos or the first Camper Van Beethoven album (and before it was released) that people began to notice this song. Usually because we had given them a demo tape. Our friends were also dubbing and passing around our cassette. It started to become one of our popular songs. At least within our circle of friends.

But it was not the only song that people liked. Lassie, Where the Hell is Bill and Club Med Sucks were also popular with our friends. In fact Where The Hell is Bill and Lassie were much more popular with our friends.

So it should not surprise you that I never thought that Take the Skinheads Bowling would become a Hit. If someone had traveled from the future and told me we would have a hit on our first album I would not have picked this song as being the hit. Not in a million years. I would have more likely picked Where the Hell is Bill.

Why? we regarded Take The Skinheads Bowling as just a weird non-sensical song. The lyrics were purposely structured so that it would be devoid of meaning. Each subsequent line would undermine any sort of meaning established by the last line. It was the early 80′s and all our peers were writing songs that were full of meaning. It was our way of rebelling. BTW this is the most important fact about this song. We wanted the words to lack any coherent meaning. There is no story or deeper insight that I can give you about this song.

Lassie and Where the Hell is Bill were silly but there was at least a point to the songs. Plus both songs were pretty jokey. Something that seemed popular at the time.

When we first put out the Telephone-Free-Landslide-Victory we mailed out a fairly limited amount of albums to radio and press. We got a few good reviews and a handful of college radio stations began to play a couple of the tracks. Where the Hell is Bill was one. Club Med Sucks was another and then of course Take the Skinheads Bowling. We were pretty excited. There were probably 20 college radio stations in the country summer of 1985 that were playing our record.

In September we decided that we should mail out another round of promo copies of our album. We expanded our list of college radio stations we added a few commercial stations like KROQ in LA and WLBS in detroit. Someone also suggested we send copies to two or three BBC DJs in london.

Sometime later that fall something unexpected occurred. We began getting reports that BBC 2 was playing Take The Skinheads Bowling. Simultaneously it began getting regular airplay in Detroit on WLBS .

Up until this point College Radio had been mildly supportive of Camper Van Beethoven. But somehow word began to get out that we were being played on the BBC and suddenly our cool factor went way up with college radio. I had been calling various West Coast college radio stations for some time. I was always trying to find gigs for Camper through the college stations. I was also aware that this also helped to promote airplay.

I was always treated decently by these college station program directors but I could tell that some were just humoring me. So it was very apparent when the sea change came. Suddenly everyone would take my call. And everyone wanted to talk about the fact we were getting played in the UK. Shortly after this we began to see our record charting on nearly every college radio station in the US (as well as a number of commercial stations.)

I have no proof that the BBC playing Take The Skinheads Bowling led to more US airplay. It is just a strong hunch. And I think I am probably right. But what I know to be true is that Camper Van Beethoven acquired Gravitas when the BBC began to play us.

For a band like Camper Van Beethoven gravitas was an important property. Without it we would have been regarded as novelty or joke band. We would have been regarded in the way our friends (and fellow travelers) The Dead Milkman were regarded: A cute band, an interesting and clever novelty. (BTW I do not agree with this characterization of the Dead Milkman).

The Dead Milkman were a punk band from Philadelphia. They put out their first album almost the same week Camper Van Beethoven released their first album. They were funny and irreverent like Camper Van Beethoven. Like CVB they mixed serious songs with silly punk rock anthems like “bitchin’ camaro”.

Camper Van Beethoven was definitely a weirder ensemble but the bands were very very similar in many other ways. Our fanbase overlapped a good deal. They were also on a very small independent label. The same college radio stations played us. And they also were completely self directed.

For the early part of our career the two bands were traveling in parallel. With the Dead Milkman being perhaps a little more popular than Camper Van Beethoven. But after the BBC airplay Camper Van Beethoven began to be to be regarded as more serious. Serious mainstream journalists began writing favorable stories about us. Spin magazine and The Village Voice featured us. We also began to garner interest from major record labels. IRS records which was on a hot streak came a-callin’. We turned them down but we were able to parlay our newfound gravitas into a distribution deal with Rough Trade Records. More importantly Rough Trade functioned as our label in the rest of the world bringing greater sales, publicity and radio play across Europe and Australia. Camper Van Beethoven quickly surpassed The Dead Milkman critically and commercially. It wasn’t until long after Camper Van Beethoven had disbanded that The Dead Milkman had their big commercial success with the MTV hit Punk Rock Girl and sadly they never acquired the gravitas that they deserved.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So I don’t really know what made Take the Skinheads Bowling a hit. I’m sure it was a lot of different things. But I’m gonna drill down, and focus on one tiny element. I know it’s not likely correct to attribute the success of this song to this one small event. It’s simply an exercise to show how a tiny accidental decision can make a huge difference in the success of a song, album or artist.

Assume that the BBC playing Take the Skinheads Bowling was the primary engine of success for this song. Then one little handwritten note on the beautifully designed Independent Project stationary made all the difference in the world for this song.

See someone told me that many of the BBC DJ’s did not accept unsolicited submissions unless they were accompanied by a personalized handwritten note. But this was not common knowledge . Somehow this little factoid filtered down to us and when our album(s) were mailed they included a personal note to the DJ from one of us or Bruce Licher . I don’t recall who wrote the notes just that they were included. I like to think the handwritten note on Bruce’s beautiful Independent Project stationary caught someone’s eye. This made our album stand out from the stacks of albums that the BBC would receive each week. And this small detail, this tiny flap of a butterfly wing made Take the Skinheads Bowling a hit.

* ”throw ten records against the wall and see which one sticks” This is often attributed to Atlantic records founder Ahmet Etegun. I’ve googled it and find no evidence he ever said it. Still the modern 1950-2000 music business was based on a success ratio of something like 1 in 10. 1 success for 9 failures.

*** It is know that there is “wild” variation in book sales and other cultural products. Since YouTube views of music videos seem to vary wildly and using YouTube views as a good proxy for album/single sales I’m not going out on a limb by stating album/single sales also vary wildly.

**** Actually this last statement does not really follow. I know many of my readers are smart and will quickly point this out. For the sake of readability I am completely fudging here. I believe my conclusion is true but it’s a much longer argument and involves some induction.

“If a hit machine existed it would have to output wild variation in sales because in actuality the variation in sales of albums are wild” No that doesn’t follow. Previously we were assuming that the inputs were exactly the same. The only way this follows is if all albums in the known universe have the same inputs. Clearly they don’t.

Instead the logic is much more complex. It first involves the fact that there are known pairs or even triplets of albums that have substantially the same inputs. The variation of sales in these pairs or triplets of albums is so great (thriller vs off the wall) that this inductively suggests the hit machine will produce a wild variation in sales.

Or another way of looking at it. If there were a hit machine the market would eventually nudge the labels into using only the best inputs, those that produce the greatest sales. These would all be virtually the same inputs. But the market doesn’t do this because it “knows” the inputs don’t matter all that much.

(And the market may know this because at times in Nashville and Hollywood the record labels have come very close to using exactly the same inputs over and over again and they still got “wild” variation. For instance in the late 1990′s at any time the top 10 modern rock tracks were usually mixed by just 3 or 4 mix engineers!)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[INTRO:]
[C]-[Fmaj7]-[C]-[Fmaj7]-[C]-[Fmaj7]-[C]-[Fmaj7]

[C] Every day, [Fmaj7] I get up and pray to [C] Jah [Fmaj7]
[C] And he increases the number of [Fmaj7] clocks by exactly one [C] [Fmaj7]
[C] Everybody’s comin’ [Fmaj7] home for lunch these [C] days [Fmaj7]
[C] Last night there were [Fmaj7] skinheads on my [C] lawn [Fmaj7]

CHORUS:
[G] Take the skinheads [F] bowling
Take them [C] bowling [F]-[C] [F]-[C] [F]-[C]
[G] Take the skinheads [F] bowling
Take them [C] bowling [F]-[C] [F]-[C] [F]-[C]

Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes (got big lanes, got big lanes)
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same (look the same, look the same)
There’s not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything (anything, anything)
I has a dream last night, but I forget what it was (what it was, what it was)

REPEAT CHORUS

I had a dream last night about you, my friend
I had a dream, I wanted to sleep next to plastic
I had a dream, I wanted to lick your knees
I had a dream, it was about nothing

REPEAT CHORUS x2

South California as proposed by secessionists.

05 St. Cajetan

I was browsing the web last night and came across this NY Times article about the Inland Empire and 10 other counties wanting to secede from the state of California. The idea is to form their own state called South California. Not to be confused with the Mexican states of Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur (Lower California North and Lower California South). If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you already know about the Inland Empire of California. It’s geography and how it differs significantly from the rest of the state. But here’s the quick synopsis.

The Inland Empire, Mojave Desert and much of the Central Valley (think Bakersfield) are very different than the rest of the state. It is poorer, more agricultural than a lot of California. It is also populated by a lot of people that moved along the southern wagon trails, railroads, highways and interstates from the Southern States of the US to the California. Also there was a significant Mormon migration (The Mormons once envisioned their own seperate nation that included this area of California).

The City of San Bernardino was first the center Morman migration to California and next a significant Pro- confederate settlement during the Civil War. This area has often acted like it wanted to be part of something other than California. And much of the time it has shared a sort of affinity with the US Southern States.

When my family first moved to California from Spain. (My father was in the US Air Force) I saw so many “confederate”* flags I assumed that Southern California was somehow part of the Confederacy. That wasn’t that far fetched. Indeed it tried.

From KCETs excellent history of secessionists in California (both from the Union and state of California):

On August 25, 1861, troops under the command of Major William Scott Ketchum secretly moved into San Bernardino amid rumors of rebellion. The next month, in the nearby mining town of Belleville (close to the present-day site of Big Bear Lake), the presence of Union dragoons in the streets quashed a election-day riot by secessionists.

Sweet Home San Bernardino.

To further the feeling that I was living in a lonely outpost of The South or at least Texas, Southern Rock became enormously popular in the Inland Empire. I know Lynyrd Skynyrd was enormously popular everywhere in the US but in the Inland Empire that popularity extended far down into the lower echelons of Southern Rock ie Charlie Daniels Band, Molly Hatchet,The Outlaws etc. Green Grass and High Tides was as important an high school parking lot anthem as Stairway to Heaven. Indeed in the late 70′s it was not un-common for local FM station KCAL to boast of playing a 1/2 hour of uninterrupted southern rock.

And why shouldn’t this stuff have been staples of FM rock radio? all through the 70′s, the stuff wasn’t that different from what The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were playing. Both played southern blues and gospel based rock. The difference between the english blues rockers and the southern blues rockers had mostly to do with their public persona. The Stones and Led Zeppelin may have sang about the working man the poor and downtrodden from time to time, but they decidedly cultivated an image as being part of some sophisticated elite. Albeit a dangerous, decadent and hedonistic elite. Contrast that to the Allman Brothers earthy notion of “The Family” or Lynyrd Skynyrds sneering contempt for elites and northerners. You got the feeling that the English bands sang the blues ( and sang it well) but the southern rockers actually lived it. They were still decadent and hedonistic but it was a down home working man’s kind of hedonism. Hell raising. Boys being boys.

As the the New York times article nicely notes there is also a recurring sense of victimhood in the Inland Empire. Similar to what you find in the south. In the Inland Empire it goes like this: the hard working, poorer inland californians have a better and more traditional way of life but it is constantly under attack from northern, sacramento or big city elites. “And if we were just left alone to run their own affairs things would be so much better”. Does this sound familiar? This is not to say that like the other southerners they at times do have a point.

I believe it was that subtle subtext that made southern rock so appealing in the Inland Empire. That and the family ties to the US south.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

All of this was intended as an explanation of how two california boys, myself and Johnny Hickman , became well versed in southern rock.

I classify St. Cajetan as a southern rock song. It’s what we were intending to create with that song. Hear the southern rock “oooo’s’ in the chorus backing vocals? The stomping drone of the guitars and drums. The fabulously overplayed climatic guitar solo. If we had 4 guitar players there would have been a 4 part guitarmony at the end.

Its also the song on the first Cracker album that most differentiated it from Camper Van Beethoven. While Camper could expertly play with the Jimmy Page/ Peter Green english blues rock oeuvre, mythologizing it in a semiotic/Roland Barthes sort of way, CVB never really played with the southern rock sound (despite the fact Greg Lisher sounds so much like Dickey Betts at times it’s uncanny). As one of the ways of differentiating Cracker from CVB we went a step farther and embraced southern rock. This is not to say we weren’t embracing it in the same post-modern** way that CVB embraced Led Zeppelin, we weren’t trying to be 100% authentic. It was a tip of the hat to southern rock from a couple of South California rockers.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

St. Cajetan was named after the performance space in Denver. An old Catholic Church in Denver now part of the university there. Camper Van Beethoven was playing a show in this venue and I was sitting around with an acoustic guitar backstage. I came up with that riff and named it “St Cajetan”. Camper Van Beethoven broke up before i could ever turn that riff into a song. So this was probably the first or second Cracker song.

Loosely the supplicant in the song is asking St. Cajetan for a cool drink of fresh water. Which is not water at all. Salt water being being heartache. Nothing more to it.

*I know this is a misnomer the flag commonly called the confederate flag was not actually the confederate flag.

** All ROCK IS POST-MODERN. IT IS AT THE HEART OF THE GENRE. THERE IS NO AUTHENTICITY. ROCK WAS BORN AS A MONGREL. STOP ARGUING ABOUT IT.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

St. Cajetan

[A(-Am-A-A7-A embellishment)]
[F#m]-[D]
[A]-[G]-[D]-[F#m]-[E]
[A]-[Cm]-[A]-[G]-[A]

You know I don’t feel well.
I gotta thirst in my mouth.
And all I want is a cool drink of water.
You know I don’t feel well.
I got salt in my wounds.
And all I want is a cool drink of water.

Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
I once knew a well so sweet.
I put my lips, my lips to the pail to drink.
But I would give it all up for some water.

You know I don’t feel well.
Got the salty taste of my tears.
And all I want is some relief from this.

You know I don’t feel well
Been tossed and turned on this ocean.
And all I want is this one wish.

Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?
All I want is a cool drink of water.

Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me, St. Cajetan?

Did I dream this?

Listen to Marigold. 07 Marigold

I awoke from a strange dream just before dawn. It was Nov 3rd 2005. I know this because I wrote the dream down in much detail using my laptop. I can see the date the file was created.

I wrote it down cause it seemed like my subconscious had been processing something. My head or rather my brain seemed like it had been churning a vast multi axis array of data all night. My head felt hot. And i was hungry and exhausted. Because of this I thought it might be important.

It wasn’t as coherent as what you will read below. It wasn’t linear either. It was a few big semi-continuous scenes. And a series of fragments. I wrote them down in the best order that I could. To try and make them make sense. The main points were these:

In the dream I knew I was dying. I had a brain tumor that was affecting an area of my brain that made it difficult for me to find the proper words when i spoke. The other key part of the dream was that I went to Ecuador to find my ex-wife (who was not my ex-wife in real life). There were a series of apocalyptic events while in ecuador ; an earthquake, a civil war and a perhaps a tsunami. I was often with a tall african man who In my notes I dubbed Queequeg (after the fictional character in moby dick). At other times I was guided by a Turkish or Arab man who wore an eye patch. A repeated scene: I was underwater trying to bring to the surface this Incan artifact. A golden statue of an animal that looked like a koala.

Because much of this seemed so specific I started googling things. Like “Ecuador” or “Arabs in South America” “Golden Koala” and “Civil War Andes”.

Although the mystery of the dream never really did present itself to me, something surprising began to happen. An alternate narrative began to form as I googled these phrases. I began to incorporate it into my notes.

Previously I had noted that draft emails composed in the gmail browser would often have provocative, funny or unusual Google adwords links on the the side of the gmail window. Remembering this I began to drop whole sentences even paragraphs into a draft email. Save it. Close it. Then i would reopen and look at the ads. At this point the narrative began to explode into this rather long… Poem? Short story? Treatment for the next Cohen Brothers movie? I don’t know what this is.

At one point I thought that I would make an album or something out of this. I wrote the first song. It’s this song. It’s called Marigold. And as much as I like this song, I don’t think an album of pop music could ever come close to the wonderful weirdness of this bit of prose that I dug out of my googled subconscious.

Conquistador

neon clouds swirled above the alcohol like a flame

yet i followed her

for the health of my disease hung in the balance

i had no choice

i flew southward into a chaotic metropolis.

i rode in taxis and stuttering tramcars

I rode in jitneys up steep hillsides

dirt trails through villages

the chaos dwindled

the dramamine and cane liquour shared with strangers

i drew closer

and knew i was dying.

at the last town a friendly hotel

in the ruins of a conquistador redoubt

i shared a room with a cyclops

i slept with a knife and an antique pistol

we never spoke except in the rowdiness of the bar

i shouted in english he in turkish

yet i came to understand he was a bandit

who likewise lost an eye to a greek sailor

languid, drifting, i was without purpose

days months or years passed

i have no recollection

i had lost my purpose

i knew i was dying but even that i postponed.

alas an unknown offense was committed

a huddled circle, murmurs from the shabby tea room

a quick glance over the shoulder from the bandit

it was settled

i was to be exiled.

the desk clerk obliged me with a guide

his name was queequeg

jolly and earthy

but always darkened when my flask appeared

and these days at the shadowless noon

he took me to high valleys

to my singlemindedness

and at last it appeared

we stood on a ridge and queequeg pointed down

into an improbable green valley

like ahab i limped towards her white tent

the grass beating arythmic drum brushes on denim

queequeg stayed on the ridge counting his pesos

then he watched us and waited

she greeted me happily

the tent was zippered

at dusk when we emerged

queequeg was gone

we built a fire and sat close together

I would awake in the tent to bright sun.

to my stillness

the sea of grass eddying quietly

the andean cold only a hint in the wind

and always she was away

with the aboriginals

in their high villages

returning only at night

awakened by her warmth and moist breath

i woke before her one morning

the malaise had returned

I knew it would stay this time

i drank from my flask

the earth rumbled below me

a curious thing

Appearing its way along

like an aardvark in the grass

a vectored wave and then another

what was that? she asked from the tent
that same day we packed and moved higherinto the mountains.

oblivious to those thousands buried alive under mudbrick

for the radio had been abandoned when the batteries quit

within weeks we ceased speaking full sentences in english

or any language.

then we lost even the single words

things were no longer named

nothing was discreet there were just areas

broad tones

yet we lived

grunting and pointing

like the german tourists in themarketplace in quito

the world without names was curious

a pull tab glinting in the sun,was also the sun,

and the sun was also a smell from my childhood

that ended with watering eyes a deep and powerful sadness

all things ended there

the singularity.
I should be happy i thought.

eating guinea pigs as snack food

in the high villages

dribblling quechua.

still the lurking mass metastasized and blocked the sun.

I lived in the shadows

when the militia men and teen soldiers visited

i may have been happy

which was also the sound of the grass left behind,

and also the burning taste of the L’aguardiente they traded with me.

our incan hosts feared them

weltering like smallpox blisters

nevertheless stoic they donned their bowler hats

an english court

formally and coldly played their strange waltzes

meters cut neatly in half, by duples, martial drums

marching waltzes

other times the shining path in black masks,

their ages impossible

their violence implicit.

i shared our dwindling grape with them

she was aroused by their danger and violence

we always retired early to our hut

They drank and took delight listening to our couplings.

after the earthquake i remember the C5-As

Enormous but from our vantage above they were playful toys

circling otters on the sea of thick air

fortified with smoke rising from the ruined city.

smoke rose always in this land

everywhere, which was also her hair

which was also a certain smell from childhood

which was different than thatother smell

but ended with watering eyes and the deep sadness

the singularity

I captain ahab now drunk on fermented quinoa

In desperation took a vow

to begin speaking again

it was awkward

i would shout”likewise a tit is better than nothing”.

The villagers didn’tunderstand but laughed with me

as days passed I found other crooked phrases

i shouted them in the village

or whispered them to her at night

“never ignored.. . but never more has been barked”

she stroked my hair and rubbed my stiff leg

which about the time of talking had developed a tremour

I knew i was dying

and that was all

there she stayed

in villages of altitude sickness

for a nobler cause than I

like a deep sea diver who surfaces to fast

i had left the continuous wordless realm,

and entered into the discreet world of language too fast

noxious gases had formed and chemically bonded with the words

new molecules of speech were born

twisted strands and double helixes

benzene rings

an alchemy of sorts

i could only share my secrets with other alchemists

the rhyme for orange

the strange beauty of the word “vacuum”

one night she sent me away with the militia men.

she sobbed and spoke in perfect non crooked english.

i was dissappointed she did not share my gift

i cried and was angry

in the valley of the whispering grass a trap was sprung

shining path rose black against the moonless sky

i laid down in the grass and listened to echoes of bullets

the echos stopped

the shining path walked around and slit the throats of the wounded and dying

when they came to me i waited for the knife

instead water from a cup.

a bit of bread

“vacuum” said one of the hooded

at dawn i woke in the eddying grass

surrounded by the still surprised militiamen

though of course they were still dead

perverse relief i had not dreamed this

improbably queequeg was on the ridge where i left him

many many months ago

queequeg spoke of the earthquake

the city was dangerous and ruined

full of armed gangs and american marines

there was a civil war

although he offered to take me to the conquistador hotel bar

to see the cyclops

i shook my head to decline

along the coast to queequegs home

an old colonial port city

curious blacks and melungeons

with japanese surnames

an endless circle of bars

queequeg lived amongst the colourfully painted tin

in the tidal flats along the beach

each morning he took a crowded bus to the north

shrimp farms amidst the dead mangroves

disapproving witness to a bloom of nitrates fingering to the sea

while i was drunken abuelita on the bus

proffered seats and gently led off

the bus cobbled away into the old quarter slums

streaming beyond

i limped to each bar in succession

these a legacy of a bauxite boom

in the previous century

grave nations preparing for carnage and war had found this gentle place

flattered her

brought her to flowering

and then abandoned her.

an apartment building on the bluff above

built to resemble a ship

porthole windows,

looked to sea

jilted

only now as an old maid was one of her suitors to return.

embarrassed by it’s continued youth and virility

she pretended to have forgotten him

she looked away to the sea.

at night marines filled the bars

i had ceased speaking

they called me the mute, gently mocked me and bought me drinks.

they helped me into the converted hearse

a cab driven by one of queequegs uncles or cousins
the seasons were a gentle wobbling

barely perceptable but at the equinox a rotation occurred

the first marines bawdy

these were mean conscripts

the first night they beat me unconcious

i awoke after some days in a military hospital

my countrymen were like aliens

they smelled of milk and disinfectant

they told me i was dying

i tried to sign a document

i was given cash by a civillian with a terrible mustache and reflective glasses

i was assigned a congenial MP and a wheelchair

he talked of affairs i knew nothing about nor cared

an oil pipeline had been sabotaged the day before

the crisis in my former country

he took me to queequegs colourful tin

but i refused

at last he understood and carefully wheeled me into the don quixcote

with its yellowing bullfight posters and blaring television

that night i dove into that lake of drear

swimming along the bottom i found a golden dead koala

i knew this was my alchemist prize

all the crooked phrases had unraveled the singularity

i clutched it to me before the blackness hit

i was kicked by a barmaid

she was shouting in spanish

my tattered denims were warm with urine

the tile of the floor was cool on my cheek

this soothed me

a crowd gathered around me as if i was dying

i clutched the koala to my chest

no one would take it.

Š2005 David Lowery

Listen to 02 The Palace Guards

I am totally hijacking the 300 songs blog for a few days to blatantly promote my new album solo album The Palace Guards.

It comes out Feb 1st 2011 and you can buy the CD here from:

click here for Amazon

download from itunes click here

I was driving around in my car listening to the reference master of my new CD The Palace Guards. I like to listen in my car because it’s a good to hear how your albums sound outside of a studio or on something other than a high end set of speakers. Beside this is where most people I know listen to music. I had my 11 year old with me and I sort of forgot he was listening to the album as well.

“Dad, didn’t this song start out as a kid’s song” my 11 year old asked.

I had to think about this. Yes indeed he was right. I remember that a few years ago when he was really really young (maybe 7?) I had been playing this bit of music and thinking it would make a good ironic post-modern parenting type kids song. I asked my same son then 7 if I was to make a kids album what should it be about?

“Space or the planets”

Actually that’s a good idea. I mean there are 9 planets. Well maybe 8 but you could do a song about whether pluto was a planet or not. 9 Tracks on an album not bad. Plus you could have a track about the Moon as an iTunes bonus track and one about the Sun as an Amazon.com bonus track.

And the whole concept makes for some very good ironic post-modern kids album titles:

Venus is Hot (and so is your mom)?

Mars is Angry (and so is your dad)?

you get the idea.

But this was just kind of a passing thought and I eventually forgot about it. At least until my 11 year old brought it up.

“Dad ? what is this song about?”

“Um that’s a little hard to explain”

“Why?”

“Well cause it’s sort of a superhero team, The Palace Guards’ but they aren’t exactly good, and they are not exactly telling the truth.”

What I was getting at is that in my song “The Palace Guards” are a group of superheros who have crossed some sort of line. They’ve gone from being the public’s protectors to being overprotective, secretive and controlling. They’ve turned into Stalkers.

Yes it was intended to be a metaphor about the growing power of government!

Just kidding. It’s just an accident that it happens to work so well as a metaphor. Watching the protests in Egypt you could very well think of Mubarak and the ruling national democratic party as The Palace Guards.

The other curious thing about this song: The song shifts between third person and first person. When in third person the narrator praises The Palace Guards and portrays them as noble, selfless and a tad misunderstood. But than the narrator shifts to first person and you realize that he is actually one of The Palace Guards. Not only does this make the narrator seem much less “reliable” it also suggest that he is a little crazy. Continuing with the theme of authoritarian governments, it’s a little like the pro-government newspaper praising and making excuses for the authoritarian government. They are essentially the same thing but they pretend to be otherwise.

And then there is the end of the song. I love singing this part. Getting to finally drop the whole charade and scream:

I work my fingers to the bone

to keep the little piggies safe in their little straw homes

I rip my heart out every day for you

I rip my hear out every day for you.

See I’ve painted this totally crazy un-reliable character and then I try to make you empathize with him. And if i’ve done my job you do empathize with him and now we are all mad. Get it?

This is NOT how I explained this song to my 11 year old son. But he still managed to grasp some of this from my watered down description. Cause suddenly I get this from the peanut gallery:

“So he is not a normal Cartoon Network superhero, he is more of an Adult Swim kind of superhero, Right?”

First of all let me openly acknowledge I am hijacking my blog for a few days to talk about the songs on my upcoming solo album The Palace Guards. Available everywhere Feb 1st.
And I know I have a lot of competition this week. It looks like a number of my peers are releasing records. So let’s quickly review them.
First off Iron and Wine has a new album out. Kiss Each Other Clean. I am told it is a 45 minute field recording of Sam Beam humming The Theme to a Man And a Woman while he vacuums.*
Then there is the new Deerhoof album which is titled Deerhof vs Evil. This is also a strange album. It consists entirely of Brittany Spears covers with vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki singing in a fake texas accent ala Stan Ridgeway of Wall of Voodoo. **
Finally there is REMs new record “Mine Smell Like Honey” which is a concept record about Michael Stipe’s testicles. ***

So as you can see you are much better off spending your 8, 10 or 12 dollars this week on my new solo Album The Palace Guards.
Click Here to buy an autographed CD from Newbury Comics.

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There is this magnificent book by gabriel Garcia Marquez titled the Autumn of the Patriarch. A sprawling first hand account of a south american’s dictators improbable 100+ year rule.
Throughout the story the dictator repeatedly sells out to various world powers eventually selling the sea to the Yanquis.
I loved this phrase. I’ve turned on my tongue many times while strumming guitar trying to fit it into a song.
I never found a home for this phrase until in 2009 I found myself inexplicably flying in a US Army combat helicopter 2500 meters over Iraq. We were on our way from the Coalition base at Basra International Airport to a US armed forces base variously referred to as Camp Adder by the US army or Ali airbase by US Air Force. Most People call it Talill.

We were engaged in what had become the familiar GI shit talking on headsets as we flew. Questions from the crew about details of life touring in a rock band. Us asking questions about their lives, their experiences and some good gossip about celebrities politicians and others they had ferried around Iraq.

At some point one of the pilots or crew members mentioned that we would be flying over the Ziggurat of Ur. Although I had spent a good deal of time prepping for this trip by reading histories of Iraq and accounts of both Iraq wars, I didn’t know what this was.

“It marks the city of Ur which is literally the birthplace of civilization”

“Ur was probably the first or one of the first urban human settlements, the first city”. another unknown voice on the internal comms chimed in.

The pilots obliged us by banking the aircraft in a large arc as we went into Talill so we could get a look at this historic site.

The ziggurat comes clearly in focus at 0:12 seconds.

I remember looking down at this and getting this weird sensation. This feeling that you sometimes get when you are flying and you see the curvature of the Earth.

You get this sense of how small you are. How short your life is in the span of human history. How insignificant your small deeds and actions. At the same time you get a glimpse of the huge yet unseen forces that shape everything we do.

The green of the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigres. The great arc of the fertile crescent that produced the first large groups of non-nomadic peoples. How the land itself shaped who we are and what we do. Farming and craftsmen then produced a (relatively) gentle life that produced cities scholars and philosophers. The great expanse of desert on one side. A harsh wilderness to some but a home of sorts to nomadic tribes like the arabs. They became skilled warriors and traders taking goods from once place to another.

The Kurds on the other hand in their distant blue mountains, their strongholds they are independent and wary. Their great herds of livestock still the cultural link between the eurasian steppes and the Persian gulf. The people of this land also straddle the linguistic divide between the semitic languages of the south, the Indo European mother tongue to the north and the mongol horseman borne languages of the East.

At an altitude like this you can see how the land shaped the people. At an altitude we all become philosophers.

And other things. I had an officer comment to me that we won’t leave Iraq for a long time because:

“we’ve scrambled their economy and now it’s reassembled around our supply lines. The gulf arabs come in from the south and the Turks from the north. They use our supply lines. It started with their mobile phone companies now it’s their construction companies, and so on…when you fly back to kuwait you can see the flow of containers and equipment coming in. It dwarfs what we are taking out”.

There it is again. When you fly you become an economist, a geopolitical scientist and a philosopher.

So here I was a son of a career US Air Force NCO. I couldn’t help noticing the vast infrastructure of the Air that we were building. Rows of antennae non-directional helixes, which told me they were for speaking to “birds’ or satellites. As well as the more familiar satellite dishes. Air Traffic towers, infrastructure for unmanned ariel vehicles, airstrips for our large aircraft, and the strangely a high tech reprise of Edwardian blimps bristling with sensors and cameras. All this showing no sign of a drawdown. Sure we’re removing most of our ground forces, but instead we leave behind our dour civillian contractors with their mustaches and sunglasses. Our clever Australian, South African and English engineers to build and man our lethal redoubts. Our invisible fortresses in the Air. No one will notice.

Although unsure about the wisdom of this naked thrust of our imperial might my chest couldn’t help swelling with pride for my country. I suddenly felt like chanting USA USA USA!!

The English and their grey warships. They controlled this part of the world by controlling the sea. The Turks with their masterful bureaucrats backed by cruel and efficient armies. The Mongols with their highly disciplined calvary of squat horses. The Arabs with their swords, caravans and the crescent moon of Islam. And two dozen other forgotten empires. They all came to rule this part of the world.

And so on my way out of Baghdad on the roof of what serves as the passenger terminal for officers and US government employees in and out of Iraq I began composing this.

“I sold the Yanquis the Sky, I sold the English the Sea. I sold the Mongols the Steppes. No too obscure. People will think ‘steps’ instead of ‘Steppes’, I sold the Ottomans… no people will think furniture, I sold the Mamluks the… ? Who? I sold the Romans the chariot? sounds sort of pathetic. I sold the Arabs the Moon.”

I also thought of my father as I was writing this. I couldn’t help because he actually died this day (January 26th). I wondered if all those years of flying around in planes had made him a philosopher. He never really talked about much in a geopolitical context. Although I do remember a vague memory of him pointing out the faint arrow straight outline of the roman road out of Londinium towards Dover. And of course scrambling around on Moorish and Roman ruins when we lived in spain. He clearly had some sense of the bigger historical picture. I also document this in the Cracker song Riverside. My father metaphorically stands on the bank of the river Styx which in greek mythology separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.

I can’t see you standing by that riverside.

I can’t see you standing by that riverside.

See you on roman roads, aqueducts and matadors

See you on Moorish walls, Alhambra, Seville

05 Riverside

The Doubtful Guest. By Edward Gorey. Eventually I’ll get around to explaining what this has to do with the song.

Pre-order autographed copy of this CD from Newbury Comics. click here.

Deep Oblivion is a track from my first solo album The Palace Guards (Feb 1st 2011). I originally started this solo project in a deep depression about the viability of making albums. By this I mean the rampant illegal downloading of songs had not just reduced CD and Album sales but had eliminated much of the infrastructure that made it possible someone like me to spend time recording music: The record label.

We artists bitch about our record labels all the time. but ultimately the record label is very useful. If you have a record label, you don’t worry about all kinds of things. Manufacturing CDs, getting them distributed, shipping them out, floating the 100k you need to record distribute and promote a CD, setting up press, setting up radio visits, bugging program directors to spin your record more and trying to get on late night TV. With a record label you spend most of your time on the creative aspects of your career. Writing songs, recording music, making videos, writing your blog or updating your cat’s twitter feed.

(btw the band Best Coast -who I’m about to interview- really does have a twitter feed for their cat “Snacks”. It’s often pretty funny. They also have an ongoing contest to caption pictures of their cat. You get free tickets if you win. Here is my entry. I hope i Win!)

“Death to America”

Without a record label you end up doing that stuff yourself. Even if you have the cash to hire independent specialists to manage this work for you it is a mental distraction managing and directing this process. Ultimately not having a label directly affects the amount of time you spend on creative endeavors.

Indeed in 1985 when Camper Van Beethoven first started pitch-a-tent records it was because no one else was interested in releasing Camper Van Beethoven records. It was not because we had some sort of DIY ideology that dictated we do this. We knew it was gonna be a lot of work to have our own label. And as predicted Jennifer and I spent long evenings stuffing the vinyl into album sleeves or carefully packaging and mailing albums to radio stations and fanzines.

But we were young and it was enjoyable in a certain way. We could buy a cheap bottle of Chilean wine at Shopper’s Corner and watch Star Trek re-runs and turn the work into a sort of party. If it was warm enough we would open the big Victorian bay windows at 1025 Broadway. You could sometimes hear the break of the surf or the Giant Dipper roller coaster on the boardwalk and imagine you were at some seaside resort in southern England. Brighton? Margate? (This is purposeful “Victorian seaside” foreshadowing for the second half of this blog)

In 2007 after more than 20 years of recording and touring with the help of a record label or two, I was dreading the fact that we didn’t have a record label anymore. Our various one-off deals had run out and it didn’t seem like anyone was much interested in giving us the kind of deal to which we’d grown accustomed. Sure we could have got deals with various labels that would have offered us 50/50 profit splits or small advances. But check this out. Any contractor reading this will immediately grasp how expensive it is to record an album:

Like it or not the minimum amount of time to mix and record and album of 12 songs is about 18 days. I know no professional highly regarded bands that will make albums at a quicker pace (unless you go the live in studio route**). So say there are 4 people in the band. Then you need and audio engineer and an engineers assistant. aside from the engineer’s assistant everyone is a highly skilled specialist. So you are looking at 5 people who should be compensated in the range of 250 – 500 a day. Then there are the studio costs. The cheapest home studios charge 300 a day. What if you had your own studio? well did you get the mixing console and microphones for free? The computer software or tape machine for free? NO. Minimal cost for setting up the crudest pro level studio is 25k. Protools HD hardware and computer is 20k by itself. What about lodging or travel? So trust me when i say an 18 day record ultimately costs a minimum of 36k. You may defer payments to your side musicians or engineer or even the studio. But when the CD comes out they will need to get their money.

Further I would bet nearly every modern (post 1980) album you own was recorded in more than 18 days. There are exceptions, but no one has made a career of recoding “live in studio”.

Then you must consider the costs of marketing and distributing a CD or even download only. Again you can’t even get noticed by the bloggers unless you hire a specialist an independent publicist or two. They use their personal contacts to bring (even a cracker ) an album to their attention. The popular and influential bloggers, like the magazine reviewers are overwhelmed with submissions. It wouldn’t even matter that we are a “brand name. “

Commercial even large non-comm radio? Forget it. You need to hire one of these independent radio promoters that essentially bribes stations with “promotional buys” or events.

Okay. ”But aren’t you gonna make a lot more money if you sell the CDs yourselves?” Yes. But most people don’t realize that an album that sales less than 25k its first week can chart as a top 5 album now. A few years ago that would have been impossible. Maybe 100k minimum to get you in the top 5. I just looked at the Sound Scan report for one of our much more successful americana peers. Their last album. touted as their “highest charting”, sold less than 50k copies in the US! I’m not even gonna embarrass them by mentioning their name. Suffice it to say that Cracker’s last album sold considerably less.

You see how this “start your own label” thing is ultimately a sketchy proposition? You put considerable capital at risk and it’s a distraction from the necessary creative “work” an artist must do. It is generally profitable for someone like us to put out our own record, but not guaranteed.

Not saying I wouldn’t put out our own albums on our own label again, if I had to… Just saying I don’t want to.

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So this solo album began as an experiment. I decided I would dispense with the most expensive parts of making a record.

First? The Band. Living in 4 separate cities it’s virtually impossible to get either band together without dropping a grand. But there was more to it. Going bandless suited my artistic purposes. I was recording the solo songs that ostensibly were solo songs cause they didn’t seem like they fit with either band. Even my two extremely talented and versatile ensembles. There is also a certain charm to those homemade one-or-two-people-playing-most-of-the-instruments recordings. “Lawrence of Euphoria” anyone? Or pretty much any of the Sparklehorse albums.

Second I wasn’t gonna bother releasing this as an album, CD, vinyl LP or download. There was no distribution or marketing in my plan.I wasn’t gonna do any promotion. I was gonna go right to the source. YouTube.

Let me explain. Robots have recently colonized our planet and made us slaves.

As a result we humans have been reduced to sitting in little cubicles emailing YouTube videos back and forth to each other.

Most people call this “their job”.

Well I know where to find everybody. Right? YouTube.

So why not record my songs in my basement? Occasionally take the files to Sound of Music and have Alan Weatherhead or Miguel Urbiztondo play some stuff on the songs, or let John Morand mix the thing? They could use a break from their YouTube-video-emailing jobs.

And why not make a video and put the song on YouTube? At last complete disintermediation. The internet has been promising this for a while. Let’s see if it works.

I put the songs Deep Oblivion and All Those Girls Meant Nothing to Me on YouTube. And some of my friends started emailing the links around. Even Adam Duritz!

But while it was a fun experiment it was ultimately unsuccessful.

I mean it was succesful in the sense that I got a lot of people to watch these songs on YouTube. And WEQX even picked up and spun the song All Those Girls Meant Nothing To Me. But it wasn’t really like releasing an album.

See everyone kept asking me “When is it coming out?”

I’d say “It’s Out. It’s on YouTube”

They’d look at me funny.

“You know the place with all the cute cat videos and rednecks water skiing on trash can lids?”

“Oh I know what YouTube is. I was just wondering when the record comes out”.

The ”forward thinking” music journalists and bloggers were even worse. They wouldn’t even look at it on YouTube. They were not ready to take seriously a completely “virtual” song or set of songs. Besides the video did not have any cute cats in it or fat people falling down.

I found this quite unfair since we musicians take their “virtual” magazines ( ie Magnet and Pitchfork) quite seriously.

(Due diligence: I don’t believe that www.pitchfork.com actually exists. I think it’s a some sort of unexplained atmospheric oddity like the Marfa Lights or it’s actually a parody site created by “The Onion” with the aid of semi-sentient machines).

(Due diligence two: As far as magnet magazine goes, I’m glad they stopped making a print issue because it was starting to freak me out. Each cover was exactly the same: Nick Cave! But they would just have him wear a different shirt. It was like groundhogs day. Nobody else was noticing and it was really really starting to FUCKING FREAK ME OUT. I swear I’m not making this up).

However eventually the effort I put into these songs paid off. I was at my part-time job at a hedge fund emailing YouTube videos of funny cats to my friends at the SEC when I was interrupted by an email from Jared Levine saying that Savoy/429 Records was interested in putting out my solo album. How rude! however I bit my tongue and accepted the offer.

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What does any of this have to do with Edward Gorey?

One of my favorite stories as a kid was the Doubtful Guest. As follows:

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night,

There was no one expected — and no one in sight

Then they saw something standing on top of an urn, Whose peculiar appearance gave them quite a turn.

All at once it leapt down and ran into the hall,

Where it chose to remain with its nose to the wall.

It was seemingly deaf to whatever they said,

So at last they stopped screaming, and went off to bed.
It joined them at breakfast and presently ate

All the syrup and toast and a part of a plate.
It wrenched off the horn from the new gramophone, And could not be persuaded to leave it alone.
It betrayed a great liking for peering up flues,

And for peeling the soles of its white canvas shoes.
At times it would tear out whole chapters from books, Or put roomfuls of pictures askew on their hooks.
Every sunday it brooded and lay on the floor, Inconveniently close to the drawing-room door.
Now and then it would vanish for hours from the scene,

But alas, be discovered inside a tureen.

It was subject to fits of bewildering wrath,

During which it would hide all the towels from the bath.
In the night through the house it would aimlessly creep,

In spite of the fact of its being asleep.

It would carry off objects of which it grew fond,

And protect them by dropping them into the pond.
It came seventeen years ago — and to this day

It has shown no intention of going away.

So my song Deep Oblivion starts the same way. sort of.

“winter’s night a creature strange and bright appeared upon the porch in a dark storm”.

This is the image I had in my head. Drawn in that strange pseudo Victorian style. The setting was one of those Victorian beachfront mansions in southern England. But the important thing is the creature.

It’s a simple metaphor for depression and madness. My own.

Before all depression was turned into a medical disease and chemical imbalances that required little blue pills and psychotherapy, people would get depressed for a while and then shake it off. Or just learn to live with it by drinking a lot and/or smoking weed. Eventually th doctor would say “Hank, you got to cut down on your drinking you are destroying your liver” and after a few tries Hank would quit. The second wife would run off with the owner of The Shamrock Lounge. But the upside was Hanks adult children would now stop by for a visit from time to time.

That is the way it has worked for generations of men of the great pan-celtic diaspora. Why fuck with the formula?

Then again there are people who really are chemically depressed. Really do have the bad brain chemistry. I don’t really think I’ve ever had it. I’ve just had the kind where life get’s you down you drink too much and end up in a fight with the dude dressed in the Sheriff Woody from Toy Story costume at 6 flags Magic Mountain. In front of your kids no less.

“Dad remember when you got in a fight with Sheriff Woody and got arrested?” the oldest reminds you.

“Funny daddy” your toddler chimes in.

Not that I’ve ever done this.

When I wrote this song I was in one of those kind of funks. I’d not done The Man Dance (def 1 please!) with any dream works characters yet, but I had recently woke up under the desk of the publisher of spin magazine and wasn’t sure how I’d got there.

I was a middle-aged. At best a minor rock star. With few other prospects. A small brood of kids. Way over my head in real estate and alimony payments And now virtually the entire CD side of the music business was collapsing in front of me. Ugh. Only touring? we’re supposed to make a fucking living only touring? I took long walks with the dog. I drank a lot.

I taught the dog to drink.

Eventually the dog died and alone I had a lot of time to reflect.

I saw myself doomed to playing chili cook-offs until my youngest son (finally after 8 years of college) graduated from Bard with a degree in Feminist Snowboarding.

I could see it perfectly in my minds eye. At the very moment he reached for his diploma I would be wrapping up the last few bars of the saxophone infused jazz-fusion version (think Sting) of Low at the Blue Lake Casino and I would fall down dead. Like some poor exhausted salmon in the upper reaches of the Mad river. ” I… Made …….it.”

And at last I’d get some rest on tour.

But our manager Velena wasn’t having any of it. As romantic as this notion sounded it didn’t appeal to her. I wonder why?

In the song I say:

We were crossing English channels

In Victorian times

In midget submarines

with parasols entwined

I was going under

In some deep oblivion

you bravely took my hand

and sweetly came along.

First of all if relentless badgering can be described as “sweet” then this song is an accurate description of what happened next.

Second. Velena’s house is full of antiques (that would make a southern drag queen proud) so it was the natural “Victorian” setting for the song and video. The fact that Velena was in an 1980′s all-girl goth band further bolstered her Victorian credentials.

Many of the original comments on this video came from women who really seemed to enjoy “The Kiss” in the video. Perhaps the real spontaneity of the kiss is what appealed to many. Velena hadn’t eaten anything all day and she was beginning to complain about how long this video was taking. Every man knows or should know that one of the best ways to end this kind of behavior is to kiss the broad and then take her to dinner. This is exactly what I did.

Now to those women out there that find this kind of talk sexist and employing outdated gender biased stereotypes I say to you:

well then stop responding so perfectly to our gender biased solutions and we will eventually stop.

There is also something mischievous about the kiss. At the time I was making this video, our relationship was not widely known. We were rightly or wrongly concerned about a number of things. Foremost was the notion that if Velena was seen as “just” my girlfriend people in the business wouldn’t take her as seriously. At the moment of the kiss I am daring her to come clean. This is what makes the video in my opinion.

Pre-order autographed copy of this CD from Newbury Comics. click here.

Deep Oblivion

12 The Long Plastic Hallway

“The music business is cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free, where good men die like dogs. And then there is a negative side.”-attributed to Hunter S. Thompson

There is actually a debate as to whether Hunter S. Thompson said this or not. I suppose because there are variants that are similar attributed to other people. Really? It sounds so much like the guy it has to be Hunter S. Thompson.

Part of this post is a story you may have heard. I like to tell part of this story at shows. usually as an introduction to the song The Long Plastic Hallway. But it definitely needs to be written down for posterity. So here goes. It also allows me to get into the history of Box O’ Laffs one of the bands that preceded Camper Van Beethoven. Like the Estonian Gauchos and Sitting Duck there are a number of Box O’ Laffs songs that ended up being Camper Van Beethoven songs as well. Most notably Ice Cream Everyday and Flowers. So Box O’ Laffs’ story is integral to the history of CVB.

14 Ice Cream Everyday

11 Flowers

Box O’ Laffs consisted of Eric Curkendall on vocals, Chris Hart on Guitar, sometimes Chris Molla on guitar, keyboards and drums, and then a host of different drummers, Anthony Guess, Chris Pedersen and Richie West. All of which played with Camper Van Beethoven at some point. I’m also quite sure i’m forgetting a drummer or two. But you’ll forgive me if I just move along with the story?

And yes that is how we spelled it: Box O’ Laffs. Sometimes we wrote it this way Box O’ Laffs? as the name was supposed to evoke a toy or board game. Often the venues would list our name wrong in ads or on flyers. They’d spell it “Box of Laughs”. This drove us crazy.

So Box O’ Laffs? was formed in 1981 when I met Chris Hart and Eric Curkendall at College 5 at UCSC. I was still living on campus and so was Eric. We constantly struggled to find places to practice. We rarely managed, so much of our rehearsing was done live at shows. There was a neat little formula. Chris and I would make up a couple of very simple repetitive grooves. Then we’d alternate between the two while Eric improvised lyrics over the top. Each “song” had a title and generally Eric sang about pretty much the same thing but each performance was always different. Sometimes radically different.

It was very easy to add a new song to the repertoire. As long as me and chris alternated correctly between the two or three grooves that made up a song, usually the drummer could follow along. And Eric? well he was good at just making shit up on the spot. After a while these improvisations became more and more settled. Eventually they would come to resemble normal songs.

Mostly the college kids we were playing for didn’t notice this process. The grooves we played were kind of bouncy and were easy to dance to. As long as we didn’t stop they danced. No one seemed to notice that Eric would be singing lines from Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, Dr Seuss stories or even laconically announcing a LA Lakers vs Boston Celtics game like a stoned Chick Hearn. This is how we worked out the songs. Sounds crazy i know but the over all effect was we came off like a slightly funky californian version of The Fall.

But a little bouncier. So a lot of people compared us to The Talking Heads.

So what does this have to do with the Hunter S. Thompson quote?

In the summer of 1983 Chris Hart our guitarist was living in LA. He was working for Eric Curkendall’s father in Pasadena. At the very end of the summer he started to call me repeatedly insisting that he had managed to get us a gig supporting The Talking Heads in Los Angeles.

Chris was never the most reliable person. Although he was the most normal or straight laced looking member of the band there was something not quite right about him. Aside from being a poor judge of character he would constantly end up in some fucked up situation. He of course would profess that he was a completely innocent bystander and had no idea how these bad things kept happening to him. The truth was we had all watched him put himself in dangerous situations over and over again. It was strange to us. Cause otherwise he was (and probably is still) an intelligent and thoughtful person

Still we had our guard down when Chris phoned us and said he’d got us a gig with the Talking Heads. We were skeptical but we wanted to believe. We called people we knew in LA for some sort of independent confirmation. Anthony even called KROQ to see if any of the DJs had heard anything about us opening for the Talking Heads. We know from our friends in LA that we weren’t in any advertising. It was 1983 and it wasn’t like we could look on the Goldenvoice website to confirm we were playing. It seemed improbable to us… still we wanted to believe. So after a little badgering from Chris we decided to make the 400 mile drive Santa Cruz to LA to play the gig.

Anthony Guess was at that time the drummer for Box O Laffs. Anthony and I got Joe Sloan to drive his pickup truck to LA. Anthony me and the gear road in the open back of the truck 400 miles to the leafy Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena. It was nearly midnight when we made it to Eric Curkendall’s parents house. Early september. We waited out in the yard smoking cigarettes and enjoying the mild night. we waited for quite a while for Chris Hart and The Talking Heads’ “percussionist”. They didn’t show.

Joe Sloan started to get really impatient and agitated. Finally someone figured out where this “percussion” player lived. We drove over to the apartment which was in a much sketchier area of Pasadena or perhaps even Alta Dena. There we found Chris Hart with a person who in retrospect was very clearly a crack head. Chris seemed pretty disoriented and stoned himself. Did I say apartment? It was really more of a crack house. An upscale crack house, but nonetheless a crack house.

Immediately our spirits fell. Still there is nothing like wanting to believe that something really implausible is true. We began to pepper the “percussionist” with questions.

“What time do we load-in?”

“How much do we get paid?”

“How long do we get to play?”

“Why aren’t we in any of the advertisements?”

The “percussionist” began to get more and more agitated. Finally he’d had enough of us and our ridiculous questions.

“Man I’m not talking about that gig. That gig is the fake gig. I’m talking about the real gig. And the real gig is after that gig. The real gig is on a flying saucer above Los Angeles”.

Joe Sloan is a big man. And at first I thought he was gonna attack the “percussionist”. Instead he turned his attention to Chris Hart. I really thought he was gonna beat the crap out of Chris. He didn’t. But he didn’t do anything to rid Chris Hart of the notion either. That is the rest of the night Chris kept a wary eye on Joe, certain that the ass-whipping was about to come at any time.

Now to quote the lyrics from the third verse:

playing on a flying saucer

box o laffs was supporting talking heads

everyone was high and having a real good time

they was having a real good time.

The story doesn’t end there. In the summer of 2000 I went to the wedding of Virgin CFO Ken Pedersen. There were several other celebrity guests at the wedding and I was delighted to find out that I was sitting at the table with David Byrne. Wow. This is so cool. David Byrne, ever gracious, stood and introduced himself to me as I approached the table. We exchanged greetings and then I said:

“We actually played a gig together a long time ago”

“Really?!”

“Yes, it was on a flying saucer above Los Angeles”.

At this point David Byrne backs away almost imperceptibly.

“It’s a long story, you don’t remember because they erased your memory of the event”

Now he perceptibly takes a step back from me. Of course I then realize that i may have genuinely freaked him out.

“I’m joking… well sort of…”

It all ended up okay and I did manage to explain the whole story to David Byrne and he seemed to think the whole thing was amusing. But at the same time I could tell he was thinking what I sometimes think:

“some of our fans are out of their minds.”

The Long Plastic Hallway

CHORUS:
La la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la
La la la la

REPEAT CHORUS

Cigarettes and carrot juice
Marijuana and lots of booze
I threw the flower of youth into that stew

The serpent’s tongues were red and pointy
But they were wearing very cool shoes
Who wouldn’t wanna sell their soul?

REPEAT CHORUS x4

We waited in line for hours
VIP passes bouquets of flowers
To see the brand new siren sing her song

The virgins then were thrown into volcanoes
A beating heart, it was held aloft
And no expense was spared

REPEAT CHORUS x4

Quezacotl and Busby Berkeley
Hanging out in Pasadena
Rodney on the ROQ, and David Byrne

Playing on a flying saucer
Box o’Laffs were supporting Talking Heads
Everyone was high, everyone was having a good time (a good time, they were having a good time)

REPEAT CHORUS x4

07 Turquoise Jewelry

come down from that condominium treehouse

stop driving around in that station wagon with the wood on the side

take off that jumpsuit you look like grace slick

staying up all night drinking that 7-11 coffee

Funny story about this song. It was all pretty much based on the alleged sighting of Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) at a 7/11 in the north bay of SF. Sausalito? Mill Valley? I’m not really clear. I’m not even sure who told me about it. Paul MacKinney (my old college roomate) Jackson Haring (our former manager) one of the guys in Spot 1019? Anyway the alleged sighting was approximately this: Someone had seen Grace Slick buying coffee at a 7/11 or other convenience store. She was wearing some sort of fashion forward pantsuit or designer coveralls, and a fair amount of jewelry. I’m pretty sure that the turquoise jewelry part was my embellishment of the story. More on that in a minute. The part of the story that makes me question the veracity of the story is that she left in a Buick roadmaster station wagon. No self respecting Northern Californian hippy would drive a Buick station wagon. Any former hippy who needed a station wagon would naturally choose a Volvo station wagon. I’m pretty sure it’s in the handbook.

Either that or it wasn’t Grace Slick.

Or the entire story was made up by one of my friends.

But what this song clearly illustrates is Camper Van Beethoven’s delight in picking apart the bones of the dead or dying Norther California hippy scene while simultaneously praising and emulating hippy culture in general. For at the same time the songs distinctly owes it’s narrative voice to Don Van Vliet. That’s Captain Beefheart to you civilians.

Check the distorted harmonica, disjointed and seemingly random horn parts, the hoo hoo hoo vocalizations and most tellingly the barked non-sequiturs.

I know Captain Beefheart was from Southern California. So was Zappa. See even the guys from Northern California in the band seemed to prefer these hippies, these musical anarchists to their Northern Californian cousins.

We were mocking the flower power, peace and love part of hippiedom while simultaneously trying to emulate and update the bomb-throwing part of the movement. Using Captain Beefheart’s voice to comment on Grace Slick was just one way of doing it. We didn’t really dislike Grace Slick or Jefferson Airplane. They just happened to be innocent bystanders. Collateral damage if you will…

(and too be fair Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane were a lot more edgy and punk than we gave them credit for).

****************************

But as previously noted Camper Van Beethoven was also defining itself against the punk and post-punk scenes. To a lesser extent the new “college rock” movement. Back in 1986-87 we actually wore a lot of turquoise jewelry. It was one of our ways of rebelling against the punk and college rock movement. It worked too. If you wore a fake indian pancho, giant turquoise belt buckle, laminated scorpion bolo tie and turquoise beaded mocassins into Hollywood’s Club Lingerie in 1987 people loked at you like you were crazy.

We didn’t wear the good stuff. Just the knock-off fake stuff you’d buy at a truckstop or “indian” trading post along I-40 somewhere in the southwest. We also spent a lot of time in thrift stores in this part of the world. Tucson and Albuquerque still have some of the best thrift stores around. I mean they were (and probably still are) hip deep in fake indian panchos and bolo ties with laminated scorpions and of course turquoise jewelry. When we’d return to Santa Cruz from one of our periodic tours, it was usually via the 40. Inevitably we’d come home looking like a deleted scene from movie Billy Jack.

Right on.

<<<<<Free Download of new song from my upcoming solo album The Palace Guards. In Stores Feb 1st. Click Here.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Turquoise Jewelry.

Come down from your tree house condominium
And start driving around that station wagon with the wood on the side

Take off that jumpsuit, you look like Grace Slick
Stayin’ up all night an’ drinkin’ that 7-11 coffee

And take off your turquoise jewellery

Shake your medicine rattle

And fill a sock with an herb
Put on your fringe skirt

Come sit down next to your man, he’s hankering for some company
Come sit down next to your man and let him cough in your ear

‘Cuz you bring me sticks and stones
You bring me everything

Take off your turquoise jewelry
Shake your medicine rattle

‘Cuz you bring me sticks and stones
You bring me everything

The word Cracker has an interesting history one that I felt worthy of further elaboration. It’s origination is widely disputed. Was it from the ’crack’ of the whip of the white vaqueros that herded Spanish cattle in Georgia and Florida? Was it because they were such poor people they cracked and ate their seed corn?

The most interesting etymology of the word purports to illustrate a history of friction between the dominant English culture and Celtic subculture of the British Empire including North America. This is not my theory. It has been thoroughly researched and written about by several historians. Much is in dispute but clearly the word Cracker is intimately associated with Celtic culture in particular the Scots-Irish of the American frontier. The most notable author to propose this is Grady McWhiney. In his book Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways of the Old South McWhiney argues that Cracker is synonymous with being of Celtic origin. Here is a brief summary of historical uses of the word.

Cracker as in a braggart or sharp and entertaining speaker. In Shakespeare’s King John

“What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?”

Craic in middle english also was used to mean “to enter into” conversation. Especially loud boisterous conversation. Hence to “crack” a joke.

McWhiney points out that this is exactly the use and spelling of the Gaelic word craic. This and other uses of the word from this period generally reference the Scottish and other Celts of the British Isles. These included not just the well know Irish, Scottish and Welsh but also lesser known Celtic groups like the Cornish, The Manx and the Hebrideans. One must remember that at this time the British Isles had yet to be fully conquered much less anglicized. Later many of these troublesome un-anglicized groups were shipped overseas to the North American colonies. The southern American colonies and maritime Canada were prime destinations. Many of these wild celts arrived in the new world fully un-anglicized. Speaking their native tongue and chafing under the English ways.

Certainly by the time these Celts hit the new world at least some of them were being called “Crackers”

From Wikipedia:

As early as the 1760s, this term was in use by the English in the British North American Colonies to refer to Scots-Irish settlers in the south. A letter to the Earl of Dartmouth reads:

“I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.”

First a little curious fact about the state of Florida. It was a spanish colony from 1513-1763. It then became an English colony for a brief 20 years. In 1783 it was handed back to Spain after the American revolution. But during those 20 years, many colonists from Georgia and colonies to the north were encouraged to settle in Florida. When the spanish regained control they continued to encourage American settlers to move there by offering land grants. About 20 thousand american immigrants and 40 thousand spanish colonists lived in florida at the time it was ceded to the United States in 1819.

The white cowboys who herded cattle in Spanish Florida alongside the Spanish Vaqueros were purportedly called ?Quáqueros.” A corruption of the spanish word for Quaker which was also generic insult for any protestant. Others say they were given the name “Crackers” by other white Floridians and Georgians because of the crack of their spanish whips.

McWhiney and others argue since these were mostly freed Scots-Irish indentured servants they were already called Crackers. Further the pan-celtic preference (at that time) for ranging cattle on common land ( in this case sparsely populated Spanish Florida) as opposed to the english preference for penned sheep and hogs, lends some credibility to the account. Cattle herding was the preferred livelihood of many of these immigrants.

As a footnote the battle between the advocates of private land for grazing and the advocates of a common free range often played out violently through American history. It ended in a stalemate. East of The Rockies most grazing activities happens on private land. In the West, The Federal Government owns much grazing land through the BLM or Bureau of Land Management. Historically this agency then doled out grazing rights.

I have often wondered if the Scots-Irish had a such a deep seated ideological preference for ranging and common grazing land as McWhiney proposes, what did those in Texas think as the US army methodically killed and subdued their Native American analogues? By this I mean the Comanches and other buffalo herding plains Indians. For ultimately the Indian Wars were a process of converting the Indian common lands to private land. Yes they may have been happy to see the murderous cattle rustling Comanche vanquished and confined to reservations. But were they not saddened by the following influx of settlers? For it were these settlers that destroyed the greatest commons the world ever knew. It was settlers from the east that divided the great sea of grass into a patchwork of poor farms and meager homesteads. Did the Texan Scots-Irish descendants secretly prefer the commons loving Comanches to their new neighbors?

Allow me to divagate for a moment so that I can make perhaps my most glancing reference yet to a song from our catalogue. Raise ‘Em Up on Honey. This is the opening track from my Solo Album The Palace Guards (Feb 1st 2011). In this song the protagonist proposes a very Cracker-like return to the common. Although for the purposes of marijuana cultivation.

Go up on the mountain build a little shack just over the line

well BLM they won’t complain cause no one surveyed this in a while

home school the children give them weapons training

just in case the DEA comes snooping round again

go up on the mountain where the water comes from glaciers blue.

With my red beard, cowboy hat and preference for the wild frontier I could easily pass for one of these Scots-Irish “lawless rascals” so detested by the English overlords. And why not? My murky family history would support this. Lowery is a common enough name not only in Celtic parts of the British Isles but very common through the main Cracker heartland. Indeed my great grandfather came from “somewhere in Georgia” and settled deep in the Piney Woods of Southwestern Arkansas. The Piney Woods are a distinct ecoregion covering 54,000 square miles of eastern Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, southern Arkansas and extreme southeastern Oklahoma. But it must also be somehow culturally tied to the Georgia and Florida Cracker heartland. And for a simple reason. Spanish Cattle.

Those Crackers herding cattle in Spanish Florida were herding a type of cattle that is still referred to today as “Cracker Cattle“. This is somewhat of a misnomer as this breed of cattle is a Spanish breed that the Conquistadors brought to Florida. Cracker Cattle had a very close cousin further west known as Pineywoods Cattle. These also were remnants of the Spanish herds. Whether they were brought west by Florida Crackers or whether Florida Crackers followed them to the piney woods is immaterial. There is somehow a connection. Indeed some historical sources equate the term “pinelander” and “cracker”. But This Is Pinelander Soul doesn’t have the same ring.

Finally the Piney woods immediately reminds me of another Pejorative. Peckerwood. My grandfather used to endearingly refer to me as his little Peckerwood. Years later I looked it up and was shocked to find it was probably the only known slur for red haired white people.

In 1999 I returned to the Piney Woods for my grandmothers funeral. There was a sea of people at the small church graveyard. More than 100 people. Most of these were my blood kin. The majority direct descendants of my grandmother. There were 90 year olds and nursing great-great grandchildren. It was impressive and beautiful spring day. The children were beginning to run in a pack. My wife at the time, Mary was pregnant with our first child. She looked out at the crowd and gestured with her head ” I want one of those”. I looked at where she gestured but i didn’t understand. ”One of those” she pointed at a flaming redhead of a boy that bounded past us barefoot and freckled. Two more followed. I looked across the churchyard and realized that my clan was full of these redheads. I laughed. ”Careful what you wish for”.

My grandmother was of course famous for saying of her red-haired progeny. ”red-hair is how god marks the crazy ones”.

We must have seemed exotic to Mary. Her family also of Celtic origin are textbook Black Irish. The Black Irish largely from counties in the west of Ireland, are not “Black”. They almost look spanish with their black curly hair and dark brown freckles. And as it turns out for good reason. The Black Irish do appear to be from the Iberian peninsula as they share common genetic markers with the Galicians, Basque and Portuguese. I reference Mary, her sisters and their love of broken, old and decrepit houses in this track I recorded with Mark Linkous.

16 Eyes Of Mary

Raise Em Up On Honey

03 This Is Cracker Soul

Cracker Soul. Perfect song to come up next in the cue. Especially after the previous two posts touched upon race and ethnic identity in the music business.

I think there is a misconception that the music industry is very “integrated”. That it must be more “advanced” than the rest of our society. It has always been at the cultural vanguard so it must surely be much farther ahead of the rest of america in marching towards some post-racial society. It isn’t.

There are black record labels. There are “Normal” labels. Under the multinational conglomerates? Black and Latin imprints or sublabels. Our old label Virgin records didn’t really have a separate black imprint, but did have a “urban” department. In a completely different part of the Foothill Rd complex! I remember the offices and cubicles seemed to have been set up by a different interior design firm. There are completely separate sets of publicists, radio promoters and concert promoters for black and latin music.

No one ever talks about this. It’s like some dirty family secret. Racial and ethnic Identity is actually heightened in the music industry.

So i’ll be the first to admit that it is weird that I never really thought much about naming the band Cracker. We chose this name almost on a whim. Although we were aware of the socio-economic/regional/racial connotations of the word, we also enjoyed the fact the word had a host of other meanings. Some well known like Cracker as in Ritz Cracker. Some very obscure like Cracker as a perforative for scottish or (gaelic speakers) in 17th century England. There was also the fact that in the early 1990′s there was a sudden trend towards one word band names, oftentimes words for everyday objects such as food e.g. Sugar, Cake etc.

But the main reason we named the band Cracker was because we had a song on the demos called This is Crackersoul. There is a simple story behind the title to this song.

Each night after we finished working on our demos we’d walk down from Oregon Hill over to one of the bars that lined Grace street next to Virginia Commonwealth University. One of our regular stops was Marvin’s. One night sitting at the bar in Marvin’s we were discussing our new project with our multi-racial bartender. Johnny was describing how our demos varied from the Camper Van Beethoven sound. That they were based more on country, bluegrass and good dose of “White boy blues-rock, southern rock, and soul influenced rock. Things like The Band, Little Feat even Lynyrd Skynyrd”.

“Cracker soul music” our bartender helpfully interjected.

Exactly. Here were several meanings of the word jumbled together. First Cracker as in “Southern Rural White”. Second to specifically refer to residents of Georgia and northern Florida (Little Feat and Lynyrd Skynyrd) and third the murky Scots-Irish roots of appalachian and southern white folk music. There was fourth meaning that also applied although our bartender could not have known given that he hadn’t heard any of the lyrics: Boasting or Shit-talking. Cracker’s narrative “voice” was noticeably cockier and trashier than Camper’s.

Notably absent was any reference to the word as a racial insult.

In 1990 very few white people on west coast, in the north or even the urban centers of the south would have been very familiar with this word. Conversely I had heard this word from a young age. My grandfather would often use it to refer to himself and his buddies who were all from the piney woods of southwestern arkansas. They all now lived in the Coachella valley in California. They did this to distinguish themselves from the native Californians. Around this time Senator Lawton Chiles would openly refer to his rural white supporters as his “cracker voters”. It wasn’t till much later in the 1990′s that this began to be popularized as a racial slur. I’m not saying it wasn’t a racial slur in 1990 but it was relatively obscure term in white america.

So Johnny had this neat little riff that maybe evoked Little Feat or something. It was catchy and bouncy and as I didn’t have any words for the song so as a working title it became Cracker Soul. Thank you very much mr. bartender. Later once I developed words to this song it changed to This is Cracker Soul.

********************************

Speaking of Crackers….

And then there was the fact that Cracker became a shorthand for a certain distinction between the public persona of Cracker versus that of Camper Van Beethoven. This is of course greatly exaggerated but the members of Cracker (Johnny and I) were more rural “southern” and working class in outlook and upbringing. My father was from Arkansas. Both Johnny and I were raised on military bases. Anyone who spends much time around military bases realizes much of the military is drawn from working class, rural and especially southern families. I was born in the south. If San Antonio Texas counts as The South. (It’s really more part of the southwestern borderlands.) Our experiences going to high school in The Inland Empire also seemed to bolster our working class credentials.

Conversely Camper Van Beethoven was seen as solidly upper middle class and a college band. Chris Pedersen’s father was a doctor. Victor’s family owned pharmacies. Not quite a doctor but solidly upper middle class. Jonathan’s parents were both college professors at UC Davis. Camper Van Beethoven also seemed to be very much a product of the culturally sophisticated Bay Area. Not a working class ensemble with roots in rural america. Of course this was also an extreme exaggeration.

Case in point: Jonathan Segel. His parents were college professors, but his mother was a microbiologist that had a detailed knowledge of sewage treatment plants. Jonathan once spent a summer touring Warsaw Pact sewage treatment facilities. She was like the honeymooner’s Norton with a PhD. Jonathan grew up in a college town , but this college town was Davis. It’s an Ag college. In the early days of Camper Van Beethoven Jonathan chewed tobacco, fished, camped and occasionally shot guns. He hung out with bluegrass players and generally qualified as a country boy. His credentials as a “cracker” are actually much better than either Johnny or I.

Nevertheless there must have been some subtle difference apparent to others. For when we began touring for Key Lime Pie we hired a new crew member. His name was Bobby Bell. He was an African American and he was from Texas. He immediately pegged me for being a little different than the other Santa Cruz/Berkeley/Bay Area indie rockers he’d worked with. He started calling me MC Cracker D. (Yeah I know it’s a little cheesy now but Hip Hop culture was new to all of us then.) He’d write it on my passes and laminates. It became my Nom de Tour.

So in this way calling my new band Cracker was simply a way of differentiating it from Camper Van Beethoven. I wasn’t trying to say Cracker was an authentic country-roots-southern rock band. Just that it had a little more of that in it than my previous band. So Cracker Soul got shortened to Cracker and Cracker became the temporary project name for our new band. It just ended up sticking.

**********************************************

Was I was punk’d?

My friends father, an African American, once told me that the modern racism was no longer based on white people thinking they were superior to blacks. It had been replaced with a more subtle bias, the fact that Anglos thought they were the Normal people. Everyone else was to varying degrees not normal. Like being Anglo put you at the center of some pre-Copernicus universe. Being a WASP was neutral and everyone else had small co-factors and properties that did not read a perfect zero. You might be a perfect zero on skin tone and hair kinkiness but the +3 Irish and +2 catholic variation from the ideal pushed you away from the center. Although readily accepted by white people poor Sammy Davis had an incredibly complex variation from the norm. +4 Black +3 Jewish +1 Italian Mob for association with Frank Sinatra plus he was in show business.

So the logical conclusion: If Anglos came to think of themselves as just another quirky tribe from a foggy, poor and cold island; a people of strange music and customs;a tribe noted for their spotty skin, bad teeth and overcooked vegetables; Then at last we would all co-exist as equals in a relativistic racial/ethnic universe.

Calling my band Cracker was also me doing my part to achieve this Utopia.

“Yes I am from a quirky Scots-Irish tribe of red-headed rural southern people who pretty much fry everything and are inexplicably born with innate ability to parallel park a vehicle hauling a trailer.”

But before you go all crazy with this concept due diligence requires that I tell you my friend’s father also told me that The Flinstones were actually African Americans. When I pointed out that I couldn’t recall a single non-white character on the show he became agitated and told me that All the characters were black. Further Hanna-Barbera had carefully filled the show with subtle cultural cues and flags. They didn’t need to draw the characters as black. I was white and therefore I didn’t catch these cues. It was one of the more amusing arguments i’ve had in my life. Still I’ve googled this and haven’t found anyone else who shares his opinion. In retrospect I think the erstwhile professor was taking great delight in pulling my leg.

********************************************

This is Cracker Soul

[G]
[G]-[C]-[G]
[C]-[G]-[D]-[G]
[D]-[C]-[Bm]-[Am]-[D]

Hey hey it’s okay to make
a little mess out of your life.
‘Cause you don’t need a diagram
to show you how to have a good time.

CHORUS:
I said hey (hey)
Don’t mean to frighten you away.
This is Cracker soul, it comes so easy.
I said hey (hey)
Don’t get your head a mess.
This is just the best, it comes so easy.
It comes so easy.

Hey hey it’s okay to never know
the answer but ask why. (why oh why?)
‘Cause you don’t need another burden
come and party with your spirit guide.

I said hey (hey)
Don’t get your head a mess.
This is Cracker Soul
It comes so easy.
I said hey (hey)
Don’t get yourself distressed.
Love is just the best
when comes easy.
It comes so easy.

REPEAT CHORUS

Bob Lefsetz is a smart and entertaining music business theorist and writer. Yesterday he was comparing the level of innovation and risk taking in the tech world versus the music business. As an object lesson Google and Groupon. Here is his piece.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/11/30/googlegroupon/

Odd thing. It turns out that Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven play a small role in this story. Here is my letter to Bob that has been making the rounds of the Blogosphere.

Read your article Bob. Nice piece. Largely you are right about the risk averse backwards thinking folks who run the music business now. But strangely music types played a small but important role in the history of groupon. In particular myself and my two bands.

In 2008 I was appointed to the board of advisors of a small web startup called www.thepoint.com. The site the brainchild of Andrew Mason was a ” tipping point” mechanism, a social networking site that allowed people “commit” to take group action. In particular the hope was they would take group action for social change. The investors quietly noted there was not a clear way to monetize Andrew’s experiment. However they hoped that by watching the way users used the tipping point mechanism, a viable way to monetize this website would present itself.

I was asked to start a campaign on www.thepoint.com.”To get a feel for it”. Not being very socially conscious I decided that I wanted to use The Point for my own narrow self interests.

Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven have a festival, The Campout. It’s rather remote and since we produce the small festival ourselves we take considerable financial risk. While the previous years had been marginally successful we were worried about the rapidly deteriorating economy (I believe Bear Stearns had just gone bankrupt). So I started a campaign to get a “break even” amount of CVB and Cracker fans to commit to attend the festival. In this way our fan’s promises to attend would become a sort of promissory note. no pun intended. While you couldn’t exactly peg it’s value, these collective promises to attend at some point seemed to be worth enough to go ahead and book the flights, PA, lights, and port-o-potties.

Other successful “campaigns” on The Point also involved similar commitments for group purchasing. It wasn’t long before The Point became Groupon.

Okay so that’s a story about Groupon, that has smart music people and smart techies helping each other and they all live happily ever after.

Now here is another story about Groupon that illustrates YOUR point that the modern music business is run by risk averse technophobe idiots.

The financial backers of Groupon as well as CEO Andrew Mason are music fans. (Andrew apparently played in bands and had dreams of becoming a rockstar.) Groupon’s founders wanted to demonstrate the power of the now wildly successful Groupon by putting on a series of concerts. There was a significant element of altruism in their efforts, but it had not gone unnoticed that most concerts have a lot of empty seats. And Groupon works best when the “incremental” cost of adding clients/patrons is very low. Adding concertgoers to a half full arena is a perfect example of low incremental costs. So concerts were seen as a natural fit for Groupon. I was enlisted to try to get a Groupon only concert going. Twice! Both times artists agents managers promoters all failed to understand the concept. Even my wife, Velena Vego who is a brilliant concert promoter didn’t really get it.

(editiors note this: is not quite true. concert promoter and groupon user Lucy Freas seemed to understand the concept)

(Due Diligence requires me to point out that there may be a strange mathematical logic to having consistently half full arenas. The theory is that in the long term the artists will bear the brunt of the inefficiencies of half full arenas while LiveNation reaps outsized rewards on the sold out shows. It’s a complex argument and it involves what options and derivative traders call Volatility Trading Theory, but it at least partially explains why LiveNation has been supposed to go out of business for the last 8 years yet has not. But alas I divagate).

In general, this is the story of the last 25 years of the music business. Everybody now thinks they are geniuses if they have one artist that is a hit. They think you can take something and make it a hit. They do not understand the roll of luck in this business. Instead they expect certainty and take no risks.

They no longer understand the need to make MANY risky bets. They have forgotten that most bands and artists will be commercial failures. They no longer have the stomach for failure therefore the modern record company spends 63.4% percent of it’s time trying to figure out who to blame for the failure, instead of moving on, getting back to work and searching out the interesting artists and new ideas.

After Virgin America signed CVB president Jeff Ayeroff told me ” Just keep doing what you do. one day you guys will write a hit, maybe even by accident”. exactly.

Hey all. Jill Smith daughter of Don Smith was kind enough to send this gallery of photos to me. You may want to go back and read post #61 that is largely about Don Smith. I’ve updated it with these new photos.

A very young Don Smith March 1981

Me and Don. This must have been from around 2003-2004? I remember it was my first pair of reading glasses.

The gang that couldn’t shoot -i mean record straight. Bugs, Michael Urbano, Davey Faragher, David Lowery, Don Smith, Johnny Hickman, Rich Hasel. In front of “sound stage” in Pioneertown, Feb 1993 Kerosene Hat record

Don either at his home studio he jokingly referred to as cost-a-lot. Or back deck at bearsville. Gentleman’s blues period.

Don and his beloved MCI 2 inch machine.

Another Very Young Don Smith. Tom Petty and Heartbreakers era?

Classic Don smith at work.

09 The World is Mine

So besides the our obvious big hits there have been three other significant money making events in Cracker career. The last two were especially important cause they carried us through some dry periods.

08 Shake Some Action

1. The inclusion of “Shake Some Action” in the film Clueless. And it’s subsequent appearance on the soundtrack album. We were at the peak of our career (sales wise) when this song was licensed. Bryan McPherson our attorney at the time demanded and received top dollar for the rights. Well actually half the rights. The song was written by The Flaming Groovies. So the Publishing half went to them. The other half was credited to our virgin account which at the time was recouped. And not only was the price dictated by Cracker’s stature at the time. We were also in the secondary phase of the great Alternative/Grunge asset bubble. There are three phases to every asset bubble, the three “I”s : The Innovators, The Imitators and finally the Idiots. I make no judgement upon the band Creed. But i did meet Scott Stap around 1996 and he was an arrogant idiot. This was before they were really famous. So by my own set of empirical data Creed marks the beginning of the Idiot phase of the Alternative/Grunge bubble. When we sold “Shake Some Action” it was about a year or two before the Grunge asset bubble peaked, but the price of all alternative rock songs were artificial inflated. The record companies were flush with primarily their Hootie/Counting Crows and second their Nirvana/ Songe Temple Pilots cash. There was too much money chasing too few bands/songs. The result to things like this is always an asset bubble. Similar bubbles have appeared throughout the history of the record industry. But that’s another post.

Auntie Led Zeppelin

2. A careless miscalculation by another major record label (not ours) involving the trademark Cracker? cost this record label dearly. The holy grail for trademark infringement litigators is a clear and demonstrable case of ”confusion in the marketplace”. We had that.

Quite a few people warned me that we were making a catastrophic career mistake by suing this large major label and artist. That they their associated managers and agents would never do business with us again. That they would blackball us from the industry. That all doors would be closed to us forever. These were serious respectable people giving us this advice. And apparently they felt they were receiving this information from credible sources.

The problem with this is that all the doors to the music business have always been closed for me and my bands. Except for a brief period in the early to mid 1990s. And they were certainly closed for us in 2004. I have spent much of my career prying the doors open or sneaking in through the mailroom. Plus your typical music business executive agent, manager will gladly sell his/her soul if there is a buck to be made. So if we have something that others think will sell they will always do business with us. Logically it was always an empty threat. But it’s amazing how often I hear managers advise artists to not rock the boat.

It is always better to be respected in the music business than it is to be liked. Get the distinction? Anybody that tells you otherwise is setting you up to be ripped off.

A legal settlement does not allow me to discuss this any further.

3. The Gillette company decided to use the Song The World Is Mine in a commercial. The commercial is positively dismal and unimaginative but the great thing is that we re-recorded the song for the commercial. So we didn’t have to pay anything to Virgin records. Second the commercial hasTiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry so it was shown practically non-stop worldwide. Also worldwide is very key. Unlike the US and Canada in much of the industrialized world significant airplay royalties apply to commercials. Finally because we re-sang the lyrics to match a new structure for the commercial we were considered voice talent so all kinds of AFTRA/SAG (actor) fees began to apply. So yes Gillette has been berry berry good to Cracker.

But this also illustrates one of the finer points about my career as an artist and every artist’s career. All of an artists success is wildly unpredictable. When you make an album you never really know what songs will be hits. It’s only clear in retrospect. It always seems logical but this is because we are the victims of something called The Narrative Fallacy. In retrospect we re-arrange our actions, emphasizing some discounting others to make it seem that we logically and methodically acted as if we were certain the hit song was a hit song all along. But even stranger is that a song does not have to be a “hit” to generate significant revenues. The world is mine was not a hit. The obscure CVB demo “guardian angels” was not a hit, but somehow some advertising executive plucked it from obscurity and put it in a Citibank Commercial. Finally the most bizarre and unpredictable bit of success involves the CVB track Opening Theme.

01 Opening Theme CVB Version.

Opening theme Giorgos Margaritis

Giorgos Margaritis is one of the best known Greek singers. I don’t know much about his career except that he was considered a bit of an old fogey when he made a sort of edgy comeback album: Ola tha ta diagrapso (I Reject Everything). The record was quite successful in that part of the world (Greece and the Levant). The “cover” of Opening theme was apparently the idea of producerThodoris Manikas. He purportedly found the track in a pile of discarded CDs. This bit of CVB success was freakishly unpredictable.

Finally this is my last public 300 songs post for the near future. I will most likely resume in January 2011. It has been a great experience but I must continue doing things like writing and recording music, things that actually pay the bills. I appreciate everyone who has contributed donations. I am using those funds to hire an editor to make this into a book. I promised to turn this into a book and I will. I will resume writing this when I get those details worked out. probably sometime later this fall or winter. thanks so much.

THE WORLD IS MINE

[D]-[B]-[A]-[G]
[E]-[G]
[D]-[E]-[G]-[D]

Well we went to the station
They were looking for Vegas
But I was stuck in my beat phase
Like it was 1959

They say the girls wanna hip-shake
They say the boys wanna ball-break
But we couldn’t be bothered
Cuz we’re hipper than y’all

And everyday I resolve to say
The world is mine

So will you bring me salvation
Or a standing ovation
Cuz I really deserve it
And so much more

The big kid in the magazines
You and me, we went to make the scene
?Better get your? name, man
And tomorrow you’ll be gone

So everyday I resolve to say
The world is mine

Little Known Fact. The “H C” on the Montreal Jersey is an abbreviation for the city’s motto: Heist Central. Over the last decade many many bands have had their gear stolen in Montreal, not just CVB.

13 Everybody Gets One For Free

In the wee hours of the morning oct 20th 2004 someone broke into the Cracker/CVB trailer and stole a bunch of our Camper Van Beethoven instruments. We were in Montreal Quebec. Few people down in the states realize this but Montreal is a little like Manhattan. It’s a relatively safe cosmopolitan big city, but you are really asking for it if you leave your band gear unguarded in the van or trailer.

We hadn’t. We had parked our trailer in the parking lot of the Hotel in the supposed “secure” lot. It really did seem secure as it was just around the side of the building from the reception. Maybe 40-50 meters from the front door. Also we had backed the trailer up as close as we could get to the fence, so it was not really possible to open the back doors very far. Nevertheless some sophisticated thieves managed to get break in. Check it out. These guys were pros:

They drilled a hole or series of holes through the back door next to lock hasps. Then they used something like a “saws all” to cut a rectangle all the way through the doors around the lock hasps. Say 6″ by 6″. this was through 2 layers of sheet metal and 3/8″ plywood. They were there for some time. Then they managed to get the doors open about a foot wide. They squeezed in and took all the guitars, amplifier heads and any item they could get through the opening. Basically all our instruments. The most expensive stuff. The loss was covered by our insurance but still we lost our original instruments. The loss was and still is incalculable in our minds.

And stop asking us if we ever got our instruments back. No we didn’t. Not one.

But that’s only where the nightmare begins and why the Camper Van Beethoven junior hockey league team we sponsor has an F and an M on the Jersey. It stands for “Fuck Montreal” which since 2004 has been the official CVB motto.

(It was changed by unanimous vote of the board of directors on Oct 22nd 2004. Formerly the motto had been “the last band to never stop saying ‘a bad idea is still an idea’”*).

First it had to have been an inside Job. There was only an hour and a half in which the trailer was un-attended. One of the guys had gotten in very late I think it was Victor. Like 4:00 am or later. He went to the van to retrieve something and when he went in the building the night security man asked him if anyone else from the band was coming back to the hotel? This did not seem odd to him at the time. He figured the guy wanted to lock the door and take a nap.

I wasn’t intending to be funny when I searched for images of Montreal police. But this is what I found. They made me do it.

“Fellas: try spending a little less time grooming the moustaches and little more time fighting crime. OK?”

There is a parking attendant’s kiosk in the parking lot. At 6:00 am the parking lot attendant came in and found that his kiosk had been broken into. He explained to me that all the keys were in a pile on his small desk. Like someone had tried to find our van and trailer keys. (Like we would be stupid enough to leave them with a parking attendant.)

So in this short period of time our trailer was robbed. And either the night security person from the hotel, possibly the parking lot attendant or both were in on the scheme.

I don’t remember who discovered the theft. But suddenly we were all at the van. I went to the desk to call the police. We waited some time and the police did not arrive. I went back to the desk and asked them to call the police again. This time they put me on the phone with one of the detectives who told me they were just around the corner and to walk over to the police station. This seemed odd to me. There was a crime scene after all.
“The Montreal Policeman

He wouldn’t get off his ass

So all your shit was stolen

What’s s’matter with that?”

There is a policing technique especially popular in the gallic world. In order to keep crime rates down the gallic police technique is to pretend that no crime ever happened. Try to discourage the victim from even making a report. This makes these french cities seem relatively crime free when compared to their anglo/american counterparts. This is very handy when making the point that french civilization is superior to anglo/american civilization.

It also incentivizes the police officers and detectives because then they don’t actually have to do any work.

At the police station I was asked to fill out a form. Like some kind of petty theft. When i protested i didn’t have room to write all the items stolen and the form was clearly for thefts less than $10,000 CAN (it was printed across the bottom in french and english) I was asked archly If I was “trying to tell them how to do their job?”. Assholes. It went downhill from there. They wouldn’t even come to the crime scene.

“You don’t want to come over and maybe look for evidence or fingerprints?”

“Again Mr lowery you are once again telling me how to do my job. okay? enough”.

They could not have cared less.

Jonathan and Victor had gotten the word out on the internets our website, myspace, friendster even a few gay cruising chatrooms. That was actually me. Hey whatever takes. Word was spreading fast. I suddenly got a couple of calls from the press. Somehow one of the reporters called the local police precinct to find out what they knew.

Did I already tell you that the Montreal Police couldn’t care less? I was wrong. They give a shit about geting interrupted during their 3 hour lunches by journalists.

I got a call on my mobile shortly after this press inquiry. It was the detective in charge of our case. He made it clear we were on his shit list for talking to the press and being prodded to do his job. He told me he was making our case a low priority for making it “political”.

Political? WTF? It took me a while to figure out that i’d wandered into some kind of francophone/anglophone thing. Something to do with which newspaper made the call. Fuck I can’t even figure out the politics in my own country much less Canada’s .

But I do know this. Every country has rivalries between the various levels of city/state/county/provincial/national police. I needed to literally make it a Federal case. This detective and these police were not gonna do shit. So I might as well make there lives miserable. I was in Toronto by this point so it was easy to find how to do this. One of our friends in Toronto worked for the Crown’s attorney office. Basically I made a complaint to federal Canadian authorities that the police in Montreal were not doing there job, and the detectives conduct was completely unprofessional. About 2pm the next night I get aapoplectic call from someone I assume is the same detective. He is now lapsing into mostly french to to chew me out, but apparently to emphasize his points he has to cross back into english to say “mother fucker” and “shit list’.

I would think that a grand language like french; the language of Sartre, Baudelaire and Tocqueville; the language in which Bastiat debated Proudhon, the language in which Galois wrote the foundations of Abstract Algebra; and the language of Monty Python’s famous Flying Sheep sketch; this language would have a word for “shit list”. Apparently not.

Regardless. I was on this guys shit list. As I went through the process of trying to get our insurance money we continued to spar. Copies of the police report of course were needed. Well just put the insurance adjuster in touch with Detective Liste de Merde. Et Voila more angry phone calls! and on and on it went.

Finally I just wrote the fucker into this song.

Yes there’s more to this song than that. It’s got a reference to the Project For A New American Century. It’s got the Inland Empire, it’s got the usual self-deprecating remarks about our musical career and fortunes and of course “papa was a preacher and mama was a go-go dancer”

This song was not designed to be thought about much. It is what it is.

Musically the most interesting thing about the song is that after we recorded it, live it evolved to have a much better ending. I prefer the live version to the album version. perhaps some of you will be so kind as to post a link to a good archive.org version.

*actually this was the Spot 1019 motto. CVB never had one before that.
Everybody Gets One For Free

[INTRO:]
[A] [D] [A] [G] [D] [A]

[A] I talk to the waitress
Yeah she was pretty hot
She gave me her number
But that’s all I got

CHORUS:
[D] Everybody gets one, everybody gets one for[A] free
[G] Everybody gets one,[D] everybody ‘cept for[A] me

Started a conversation
About the United Nations
Had to use imagination
She was talking about reincarnation

REPEAT CHORUS

Stayed up all night drinking
When I should’ve been home
Had a vision of the blessed virgin
Butt now I’m not sure at all

REPEAT CHORUS

[INSTRUMENTAL: CHORDS AS VERSE THEN CHORUS]

Miguel Urbiztondo
Backstage New Year’s Eve
When the policeman came to look for him
He said “What the fuck do you know?”

REPEAT CHORUS

She from the Inland Empire
Her dad was an umpire
Her mama was a go-go dancer
Everybody got in for free

REPEAT CHORUS

[INSTRUMENTAL: CHORDS AS VERSE THEN CHORUS]

I know that our last record
Didn’t do very well
But now we’re back on the block
With our freedom rock?

REPEAT CHORUS

The Montreal policeman
Wouldn’t get off his ass
So all your shit was stolen
What’s the matter with that?

REPEAT CHORUS

I got a yellow carnation
I got some Kevlar pants
I got a new American Century
Do the freedom-hater’s dance

REPEAT CHORUS

I was driving in my car
It was filled up with yams
For no obvious reason
That’s just who I am

REPEAT CHORUS x2

[G] [A]
Last call
Find the one

Everybody gets one
Everybody gets one ‘cept for me
Everybody gets one ‘cept for me
‘cept for me

Member of the Lewis and Clark expedition the explorer York. The Arikara Indians of South Dakota called him “Big Medicine” and the nickname stuck.

07 I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right

I stated before some songs are coherent stories that can be explained easily. Some are just collections of words that sound good together that evoke a mood or sentiment. And others are somewhere in between. I Could Be Wrong I Could Be Right is one of the the latter.

On one level it’s a playful jab at my wife and manager Velena, and our very complex personal and business relationship. We’ve known each other since 1989 but finally got together in 2006. On another level it is about Sacagawea and York the only African American member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In my song they have a volatile and semi-secret affair.

York was Clark’s slave. But on the expedition York was purportedly treated the same as any other member of the expedition. Given weapons, full voice and voting rights on all major decisions made by the explorers. By all accounts a very intelligent man and superb outdoorsman he was also of quite large stature. The Arikara Indians were duly impressed and gave him the Nickname “Big Medicine” and this name stuck.

Other accounts portray “Big Medicine” as being quite the stud. Fathering many Indian children along the way. Some of these reports seem quite fanciful or at least exaggerated. They would seem to me to be products of racial stereotypes of the age. But there does seem to be some consensus this is at least partially true.

The sad thing about York is that when he returned to the United States he lost all of his freedoms and returned to being a slave. He petitioned Clark for his freedom but it took at least 10 years (if at all. accounts vary) before he was finally granted his freedom. While he was on the Lewis and Clark expedition his wife was “sold” to another family in Kentucky. He supposedly died of Cholera in Tennessee while on his way to rejoin Clark’s household after his business in Tennessee failed.

But there is also a fictional ending that made the rounds. A bit of folklore it would seem. But the fictional ending is that he is freed and he makes his way back to Wyoming where he lives out his days with the Crow Indians. (Another ex-slave may have lived with the Crows about the this time)

But what’s interesting about this story is what it says about “us”. That is our ancestors of the 19th century. We knew that the voyage of discovery was the only time that York was truly free and treated as an equal. And in some way we were ashamed of that.

So “Sacagawea and Big Medicine” in the song is a big messy composite: forbidden love, unrequited love, freedom, a crowning achievement, one’s zenith, and a sad slow fall, the fictional happy ending like a fevered dream.

The Agency Group’s Proposed Routing For Camper Van Beethoven / Built to Spill 1806 Tour.

Like Lewis,Clark and Big Medicine returning home, Camper Van Beethoven was working their way from Portland Oregon back into Montana. At some point we crossed the bitterroots and Velena was wearing tall brown boots and I made the rhyme connection in my head. I wrote it down somewhere. I keep a collection of overheard things and phrases in a notebook, or sticky notes on my desktop. They sometimes become a songs.

Later that year Johnny and Sal were playing this lick at soundcheck. We were in Berlin. (Note to self: this is the 3rd song created at sound check in germany. must tour there more often.). I thought it was cool so i recorded it into my macbook as usual.

blue berlin riff

But it wasn’t until late 2007 that we actually made this into a song.

Oh and the chant over the riff? I think subliminally I was influenced by the theme song to The Wire. ”Way Down in the Hole”. I didn’t even think about it till much later. But this was around the same time I was watching a lot of The Wire.

Snoop is an excellent carpenter. Especially with a nail gun.