ryan j tressel

LIEF: Twenty-Eight

2011-03-28T16:42:00.012-04:00

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                  twenty-eight
   She inexplicably needed to spit. The saliva kept filling her mouth faster than she could swallow it. Jackson kept looking over at her from the driver’s seat, smiling nervously.
   “It’s not something I said, is it?” he asked. “You’ve gone awful quiet.”
   Lief smiled. “Sorry,” she said. All the spit made her slush her s’s. “I’m not really that interesting I guess.” She swallowed hard.
   His smile seemed less nervous suddenly. “I doubt that,” he replied.
   “What would you like to know?” she asked.
   He watched the road a minute. “I’m not even sure where we’re going,” he told her. “I’ve just been kinda driving around.”
   Lief watched the road too for a minute, then him. “I’m not really that hungry,” she admitted.
   He smiled again. “Me neither,” he replied.
   Lief pointed toward the windshield. “Then let’s just keep driving,” she said.
   “Alright,” Jackson answered. “By the way, you can change the radio if you want.”
   Lief crossed her legs. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t really like music too much.”
   “Really?” he responded. “I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t like music.”
   Lief swallowed hard again. Her mouth was still full of saliva.
   “I can turn the radio off, if you want,” he told her.
   Lief turned to him. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re a musician?” she asked.
   He seemed surprised. “What?” he said. “I used to play.”
   “In a band?”
   He scratched the back of his neck, then quickly returned his hand to the steering wheel. “Yeah, in high school.”
   “I’m sorry,” Lief said. She rested her head against the window. “That sounded bitchier than I meant it to.”
   He coughed. “I didn’t think it was that.”
   She closed her eyes. “I’m ruining this, aren’t I?” she asked. She could feel the car slowing down.
   “Of course not,” he protested.
   Lief picked her head up and turned toward him.
   “I don’t know if I hate music,” she confessed. “I’ve just had some bad luck with musicians in the past.”
   Jackson smiled. “I haven’t played in years,” he pledged. “And I was terrible even when I did.”
   She smiled. “What was your band’s name?”
   Jackson shook his head. “We didn’t have one,” he said. “Well we had like a hundred, but none of them ever stuck.”
   Lief touched his shoulder. “I get that,” she told him.
                   *
   It started to snow faintly. Jackson put on his wipers, but each snowflake was a tiny drop of rain when it hit his windshield.
   “So what are the things I’m supposed to tell you on the third date?” Jackson asked. “I’ve told you about my job, my cat, we’ve discussed my horrible high school band.”
   Lief laughed. “What did you play?”
   He looked away. “Bass,” he replied. He shook his head and smiled. “I know. The shame.”
   Lief pushed her hair behind her ears. “Alright,” she said. “Go on. Tell me. What does the handbook say about third dates?”
   Jackson took his hands off the steering wheel and held them above his head. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Is it too early for ex-girlfriends?”
   Lief nodded. “Way too early,” she said. “Keep your hands on the wheel there, mister.” The snow was getting heavier.
   “I have a half-sister,” he offered. “Melanie.”
   “Are you close?” Lief asked.
   He shrugged. “I guess. Not really,” he told her. “We were the same age, so that was kind of always awkward.”
   “What age were you?”
   He slowed down. The snow was flopping down and sticking, and the wipers were pushing it into little piles on either side of the windshield. “My parents split when I was seven, and my dad remarried when I was ten. Melanie was in my class before, so it was even weirder.”
   “So you knew your sister before she was your sister? That is weird.”
   Jackson nodded. “What about you?”
   Lief watched the snow. “I have a little brother. Named Glover,” she told him. “He’s fifteen.”
   “Is he a punk?” Jackson asked. “I’m just kidding.”
   The snow was growing fatter and faster as it fell. “He’s a sweet kid,” Lief said quietly. “A really good kid.” Something made her sit up suddenly. “And fast. He’s such a fast runner.” She swallowed some saliva. “I’ve gone to couple of his track meets. I’ve never seen anybody looks so beautiful when they run.”
   “Were you athletic growing up?” Jackson asked.
   Lief shook her head. “You know how when people run, they look so miserable? Their faces all red and splotchy? My brother doesn’t run like that. It’s more…graceful.”
   Jackson chuckled. “You know, I have no idea where we are,” he said. He leaned in closer to the windshield.
   Lief leaned in closer as well. “I do,” she replied. “There’s a state park up ahead. If you take a left at the next light. We could go for a walk there.”
   “Are you sure you won’t be cold?” he asked.
   Lief shook her head again. “I grew up around here,” she told him.
                       *
   The snow had only started to collect on the ground, so when they took each step, they could hear the crunching of the dead leaves beneath their feet.
   “You grew up around here?” he asked her.
   Lief nodded. “I used to come here a lot when I was little. The house I grew up in is on the other side. I could walk here.”
   Jackson seemed to be always a step behind her. “Do your parents still live there?” he asked “Around here?”
   She stopped to let him catch up. “Nah,” she replied. “We all moved when I was in junior high.”
   There was little light in the woods. “There should be a trail around here,” she told him. “I was hardly ever over on this side. There’s kind of a big pond in the middle. You’ll see. I always came in from the other side,” she explained.
   “The side by your house,” Jackson said.
   She nodded. She was walking carefully. “That trail at the beginning would’ve just taken us all the way around the pond,” she said. “But I could’ve sworn there was another one.”
   Jackson laughed. “You’re not going to get us stranded in the woods, are you?” he asked. “You hear about those people on the news.”
   Lief laughed, too. “No kidding, right?” she said. “The search teams always have to come and rescue them? I always wonder what kind of idiots go out into the woods in the middle of the winter like that.”
   Everything was still and quiet. The saliva in her mouth was stinging cold when she breathed in.
   “I know where we are,” she asserted. “At least I know where we’re going.”
   They walked for a few more minutes in silence.
   “I never really had anything like this near my house growing up,” he said finally. “We had a park, but it was more of a field with some benches and playground equipment on it.”
   “That’s more like our town common,” Lief told him.
   Jackson put his hands up to his mouth and blew into them. “We did have a herring run by our house, though,” he said. “My dad and I used to go there a lot every spring.”
   “Did you fish a lot?” Lief asked. She had gotten ahead of him again, so she stopped and allowed him to catch up.
   “No,” he said, and he sounded winded. His breath was a big heavy cloud around his face. “In the springtime, the herring need to swim upstream to fresh water to lay their eggs.”
   “I think I’ve heard of this,” Lief said.
   “There’s another name for herring,” he said. “I can’t remember what it is.”
   “No, no, I know what you’re talking about,” she insisted. “I’ve definitely heard of it.”
   “Have you ever seen it?” he asked. She shook her head.
   “There are like these steps,” he continued. “And the fish literally jump up out of the water trying to get over the steps.”
   “We’re almost there,” Lief told him.
   Jackson nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I used to go there with my dad, and we’d just watch them. You’d see them just shoot out of the water straight into the air. These little silver flashes in the air.”
   He stopped walking. “I remember asking my dad if he thought I’d be able to catch one. Like, I could just stand right at the edge, with my hands outstretched over the water, waiting, and when one jumped up, just be ready and catch it in my hands.”
   Lief turned and looked at him. “What did he say?” she asked. “Your dad?”
   Jackson smiled and shook his head. “He said, ‘What would you do if you did catch one?’” he replied. “Like it didn’t matter whether I could do it or not. More like it was whether I should do it.”
   Lief smiled. “That’s what I would’ve said,” she told him.
                   *
   Eventually they reached the pond. Lief sat down on a large rock on the shore. Jackson stood beside her. She could feel the cold stone through her clothes.
   “I used to sit on a rock on the other side with my best friend,” Lief said. “We’d gather all the flat stones we could find.”
   “I used to skip stones, too,” Jackson said.
   Lief laughed. “All of mine sank,” she told him. “I could never do it.”
   Jackson turned over some rocks with his boot. “Too bad it’s frozen over,” he said. “I could show you my skills.”
   Lief looked out across the pond. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been here before,” she admitted. “I always used to be on the other side. It’s weird to think that this was what I was looking at, all those times I was staring across the pond from my side.”
   Jackson was squatting on the ground rifling through stones. He found a nice smooth, flat one and showed it to her. “I’ll save this for when the ice thaws,” he said. “We can come back here in the spring.”
   “It’s just funny to think about,” Lief continued.
   He laughed. “Is this what the third date is?” he asked. “We talk about our childhoods?”
   Lief looked at him. “That’s the second time you’ve said that.”
   “What?” he asked.
   “That this is our third date,” she replied. “It’s our fourth.”
   He looked at his watch for some reason. “What?” he said. “Wait.”
   She nodded. “This is our fourth,” she repeated.
   “Wait,” he said again. He looked across the pond, then back at her. “You aren’t counting the time at the library, are you?”
   She smiled, and closed her eyes. “I count everything,” she told him.
   “Wow.”
   The snow continued to fall.
   “You like me, right, Jackson?” she asked.
   He sat beside her on the rock. “Sure, I do,” he told her.
   “Really?” she asked again. “You sure?”
   He nodded. “Of course,” he said.
   She closed her eyes again. “This is embarrassing,” she said. “But I just wanted to make sure. Because I like you.”
   He smiled. “Yeah?”
   She coughed. “Yeah. But I’ve had to spit all night,” she confessed. “I’m having a weird saliva problem. That’s gross. I can’t believe I told you that.”
   Jackson rubbed his hands together. “Go ahead,” he said. “I won’t look.” He turned away.
   She collected all the saliva she could and in one motion spit it out onto the shore.
   “I usually get dry mouth in this situation,” he said, still facing away.
   “One more,” she said before spitting again.
   He turned back.
   “I’m sorry I’m so gross and unladylike,” she said.
   He smiled. “No worries.”
   She took his hand. “When you were in your band, did you ever write songs about the girls you knew?” she asked him.
   He shook his head. “We only did Violent Femmes covers,” he admitted. “I really only know how to play ‘Blister in the Sun’ and ‘Kiss Off’. We didn’t do any originals.”
   “Truly?”
   He nodded. “I’m not much of a writer,” he said.
   “Okay,” Lief said. She kissed him softly in the falling snow.
   “Okay,” he said, smiling. “Alright.”
   Lief smiled. “Today’s my birthday, Jackson.”
   “Really?” he said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
   “I just did,” she replied.
   He squeezed her hand. “Well, that’s a big deal,” he told her.
   “I know,” she told him. “I only get one every four years.”
               *
   They were walking back to the car. The snow hadn’t gotten any heavier, but it hadn’t slowed any either.
   “Alright, while we’re confessing things,” Jackson said.
   “Oh, shit,” Lief replied. “Here it comes.” She smiled.
   He put his hands across his stomach. “I didn’t eat lunch or dinner,” he told her.
   “Oh, no!” she cried. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
   “You said you weren’t hungry,” he explained.
   She locked her arm in his. “I wasn’t,” she said. “Do you want to stop for something on the way?”
   He shook his head. “It’s probably too late,” he told her. “We’re going to see each other again, right?”
   “I’d like that,” Lief said.
   “We can get dinner then,” he stated. “You’ll owe it to me.”
   “It is getting late,” she admitted.
   He nodded. “I’ll take you home.”
   “I’m having a great time,” she added. “It’s just late.”
   Jackson smiled. “It’s okay. It is late.”
   “I think we’re almost to the car,” she said.
   “Good,” he replied. “I can’t feel my feet.”
   “We can’t be that far,” she told him.
   “I hope not.”
   She squeezed his arm. “We’re not going to be those people who get lost in the woods,” she promised.
                   *
   It was a slow and careful ride back to her apartment. The roads were slick, and the snow was falling faster than before.
   “I don’t really get meteorology,” Lief said. “Was it supposed to be like this?”
   Jackson had brought his face close to the windshield. “They have no idea,” he said. “They look at some pictures and guess. You can’t tell what this stuff will do until it does it.”
   Lief rested her head against the window. “It sure is pretty, though,” she said.
   They kept driving for a while until they reached her house. He pulled into her driveway slowly.
   “I’d invite you in,” she told him before he could say anything. “I know the roads are bad. I’d invite you to stay. But we know what would happen.”
   He nodded. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s not too bad out.”
   She touched his arm. “I’d invite you in, I would,” she repeated. “But you know.”
   “It’s fine.” He smiled.
   “So call me when you get home,” she said. “So I know you’re safe.”
   “Will do.”
   She squeezed his arm. “I had a wonderful time,” she said. “I did.”
   They kissed again, softly, quietly.
   She watched him drive away from her window. She waved, but it was dark and he probably couldn’t see her. She closed the drapes, and took off her boots. She listened to her messages.
   “Hey, Lief! It’s Liz! I just wanted to call you and wish you a happy birthday, for real! Hopefully you’re out having fun! Also, I have an extra ticket to Debasers Sunday night. Tom can’t go, and I wasn’t sure if you wanted to come with. Remember when we saw them play their first gig in the lounge? It’s crazy! Anyway, let me--” Lief hit delete.
   “Hey Leapfrog. It’s Glover. I just wanted to remind you that you are now seven. So I’m older than you. Still. Hope you had a good day, little sis.” She hit save.
   She sat and watched the snow fall through the space between the drapes. The phone rang.
   “It was alewife. That’s the other name for herring.”
   She smiled. “I’m sure I didn’t know that,” she said. “Did you look that up as soon as you got home?”
   “It came to me as soon as I pulled out of your driveway,” Jackson said.
   She pulled her feet under her, and laid back on the couch.
   “Why are they called alewives?” she asked.
   She listened to his voice crack and cough on the line. “Yeah, I’m not sure,” he said finally.
   “Is that all you called about?” she asked.
   “No,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that I had a nice time, too. A really great time.”
   Lief was silent for a few seconds.
   “And that I’m home now,” he continued. “Safely.”
   She breathed out. “Good,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
   They talked for a few more minutes before saying good night. At some point, the snow turned to rain, and by morning most of it was gone.

I WILL NEVER STOP LISTENING TO

2010-05-18T09:25:00.000-04:00

Things I hate in popular music: hamfisted politic lyrics, shout-singing, non-rhyming couplets, unsubtle riffs repeated ad nauseum. But, still, somehow, I will never, ever, ever, not ever will I stop listening to Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil.

I can't explain it. I should hate this song with every fiber of my being, but I just can't. This ridiculous bastard of a song comes on my radio and I crank. the. shit. up. Even though Peter Garrett isn't so much singing as he is practicing several different Muppet impressions, one after the other. Even though I'm highly dubious of any song that relies so heavily on a bass guitar riff. Even though it's no longer 1987. Even though--I'm all for the Aboriginal people's rights, and deplore how they were treated by Western colonialists,-- I hate how overly simplistic Midnight Oil's solution to the problem is. But you know what? I still love the song. I would never put it on a mixtape if I was trying to impress a girl, I would never actively seek the song out to listen to. But when it shows up on the radio, jammed between "One Headlight" and something by the Avett Brothers, I will stare off silently into the sunset, one single tear trailing down my cheek.

The Last Time I Will Ever Listen To

2010-05-13T07:41:00.000-04:00

"Jane Says"

A new feature here on the Tresselweb. I've always worked a few minutes from where I've lived, so I haven't had a real strong relationship with the car radio in years. But the combination of moving (making me a commuter for the first time ever) and the tape deck on my car stereo breaking (meaning I no longer have the ability to hook up my ipod to my stereo) means I've spent more time listening to broadcast radio than I have since I was a teenager.

I'll usually listen to NPR, but sometimes I just want some good music. I really enjoy Emerson College radio, in that it usually alternates between hipster music and deep album cuts of older artists, but once 7pm hits it becomes all reggae, and I have to admit I don't think I could listen to an entire reggae song, let alone forty-five minutes of only reggae. On the weekends, it's worse, as it becomes all a cappella. Nothing makes me want to drive my car off Route 3 more a cappella Verve Pipe. So it's commercial radio ahoy. 92.5fm is usually pretty good--and solar powered!--but they love Jack Johnson and Bob Marley way too much.

So sometimes I'm just flipping. And there are lots of songs that I realize I've listened to probably hundreds of times in my life--songs that I've never really had any strong feelings about, that I would listen to mindlessly while working around the house or driving---that I CAN NEVER LISTEN TO AGAIN. A song will come on the radio and something in me will snap. As if my brain has set a limit on the number of times it will allow me to listen to a certain song without comment and the DJ just played it for the n+1 time.

The first song that I will never listen to again is "Jane Says" by Janes Addiction.

When I was in high school, my friend Jesse asked me to dub him a copy of somebody's Janes Addiction VHS tape. I had the capability, and did it, but the few bits of the film I caught freaked me out. I know at some point I saw Perry Farrell's penis, and I'm pretty sure there was some drug use involved, but whenever I think of Janes Addiction, I get the skeeves.

This song is pretty grody on its own for one reason: steel drums. I think if I ever heard steel drums--wandering down the beach, or walking past some street musicians, I'd break out in eczema. And that all happens before Perry Farrell starts singing.

I also don't know how a song with only two chords and a very simple melody can be so damn long. It sounds like a eighth grader who just learned how to play guitar wrote it. I know because when I was in eighth grade and learned how to play guitar, every song I wrote sounded like Jane Says. But luckily for everybody none of the eight-minute long, two-chord songs I wrote in eighth grade have get played on the radio with the regularity that "Jane Says" does.

So, "Jane Says", it's time to say goodbye. We were never really good friends, more like friends of friends, really. But it's over. Good luck with the rest of your life, blasting out of college dorm rooms while kids are smoking pot out of old Dr. Pepper cans.

IMMORTALLO Available Today

2010-03-08T14:18:00.000-05:00

You didn't know it, but today is the first day of the rest of your life. Well, everyday is the first day of the rest of your life, but please allow me to engage in a little hucksterism today as I proudly announce the release of my new novel IMMORTALLO. It's currently available directly from the publisher's website, using this handy link. It should be available from Amazon shortly in a print edition, but the Kindle version is up as we speak. The first two chapters are up for free at the Immortallo blog, and since I'm not allowed to sell eBook versions of the book for less than the Kindle version, I would never do anything like include a link to a free PDF of the book. That would be wrong. All of us here at Stately Tressel Manor (meaning me and the cats, right now) are immensely proud of this book and hope you check it out in one of the many forms it's being made available. Preferably the one that makes us the most money, since these cats need to eat. Thanks for your time.

Doings

2010-03-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

Any audience for this blog justifiably dried up along with my irregular postings. But here's what I've been up to.

-As mentioned last week, the release of my new novella Immortallo is imminent. Here is a link for when the book becomes available. That is likely not the final cover, by the way. (I don't know how it became green, but we'll wait to see how the physical copy looks.)

-There might be more updating on the Immortallo-dedicated blog over the next few weeks, as I'll be posting sample chapters, cover variants, and a few behind the scenes posts for the die-hard.

-While I didn't end up sending in my disc (or even registering) to this year's RPM challenge (to write and record 10 songs or 30 minutes of new music in the month of February) I did end up recording new songs, an EP (does anybody still use these terms? Novella? EP?) entitled "Naming Names" I'm still working on mixing the tunes, but keep your eyes peeled to Tresselsound over the next week as tracks from the project start appearing.

-I wrote a ton of poems in the fall of 2008, and at least one of them is finally seeing publication, well over a year later. "Unified Field Theory" was written at the Stoughton Public Library some Saturday morning in late '08. There's an audio recording of me reading the poem, but I'd just ask you to ignore it, or at the very least heed the advice of Morrissey and "Don't Make Fun of Daddy's Voice"

IMMORTALLO IS COMING...

2010-02-24T10:07:00.000-05:00

Next month sees the release of my new novel IMMORTALLO. It was written this past fall at the dining room table of my new home, and shucks if I don't like it. Here is the back cover copy:

Steven wakes up each morning in a bed next to his beautiful wife. He drives his two young daughters to school before heading into a job that is pleasant but mindless. He has as close to a perfect life as anybody could want.

But he remembers another life, a different life, in a world vastly unlike our own. A world of magic and wonder. And as these memories slowly seep into Steven's waking life, it threatens to unravel everything.

In this new novel by the author of The While, the nature of reality and identity is questioned. Can we ever be sure of who we are? How can we tell the life we know is real? And who, or what, is Immortallo?

Well, I never set out to be a copywriter. But look for more details about the book's release date, as well as sample chapters and even a free downloadable e-book, for people who don't mind reading things off a computer screen and don't like paying for things, here and at the Immortallo blog. Thanks.

Somebody Needs To Fight Me

2010-01-28T10:51:00.000-05:00

I've never been in a physical fight in my life. I've been kneed in the groin, and punched in the mouth (two separate occasions, but by the same individual) but I never struck back. If my life were a movie, I would've been taunted for my inaction, and I would've scurried away in shame to find a stereotypically Asian older man to teach me some martial arts and also, maybe, some important lessons about life. But in my both cases, I took my lumps, and then went on to enjoy the smug superiority of the pacifist.

There were many times, especially as a teenager, where I seemed eager to broker some kind of physical altercation. One Fourth of July, stuck in traffic following the local fireworks show, I got out of the car I was in and started bothering the people in the cars surrounding us, including one with tinted black windows, thumping bass, and pot smoke seeping out the cracked windows. I asked the occupants if they would be willing to take a survey of Russian literature, and they took this to be an insult to their intelligence (which, looking back, probably was) and they spilled out of their car and started threatening to fight everybody I was with. There were, inexplicably, two German exchange students with us, and this almost literally scared the piss out of them, five giant wanna-be gangstas (we were in Abington, after all) shaking the chassis of our car and demanding we stop "frontin'" and come out and fight them. The police intervened, and somehow I found myself uninvited to the party we were all headed to later that night.

My first girlfriend left me for a young man in lock-up, and when he was released, he thought it incumbent upon himself to kill me, or at least stab me. He'd show up places I was, including the front yard of the new girl I was seeing, and so I sent him a letter, typed, that read: "I know gonorrhea sucks, but stop taking it out on me. Love, Ryan." I took great amusement at this, especially the "love, Ryan" part, and dropped it into the mailbox. One of my friends, I don't remember exactly who, shook his head at this. "I think you're trying to get yourself killed." I never heard back from the hoodlum, so I wrote a song about him, called "George Has Got A Knife" which was really one elaborate "small penis" joke, and then with my band opened our show at our high school with it, in front of several of George's friends. "I think you're trying to get yourself killed," somebody in the band told me, and I had to wonder if they were right.

I had many near encounters with physical violence, but all came to not. I threw some coins at a drunken table who were singing loudly (they invited me to join them). I called the boyfriend of a girl I worked with a prick one night when I ended up going out with her and him and about six of his stooges and he tried to coerce their former high school teacher into buying them booze (The boyfriend seemed kowtowed that I stood up to him). I humiliated men in front of women they were trying to impress, I openly and notoriously attempted to court away girls from boyfriends who I shamelessly mocked. From the ages of 15 to 20, I was literally begging for somebody to hit me.

I don't know if I would know how to hit someone, and the last ten years I've worried what would ever happen if I was forced into a physical confrontation. When I was young and seemed to be inviting people to fight me, I don't ever really thought that I would prevail in a fight, but I don't think it ever occurred to me that I would totally embarrass myself. But I would. I'd probably get dropped in one punch.

I think I imagined that adrenaline would take over, that I wouldn't need to consciously think about how to hit someone or how hard I would need to do it. That something animal would turn on in my brain, and, even if I didn't win the fight, I'd at least get some good shots in. In all likelihood, I don't know if I ever actually thought that much about it. I don't think I ever thought the words "I want to get into a fight" but clearly my actions demonstrated that's what I was angling for.

I live a pretty safe life now. I spend my mornings writing and lounging around with my cats, I teach teenagers about how to graph rational expressions and write papers about Steinbeck, and then come home and sit beside my bride-to-be as she watches terrible television. I happened home a few days ago to catch a few minutes of MTV's Jersey Shore, and while I was simultaneously amused and mortified at the behavior of the cast of characters (especially mortified when Lisa informed me that some of them were 30) I also recognized something, far away and distant, in the way the men on the show seemed to invite and relish violence. In one sequence, one of them literally pleads with a drunken passerby who is taunting him, pleading to not make him fight him. I shook my head when he finally did start swinging. I thought about the times that I had been hit, and how I had walked away. But, in the split second after it was clear the fight was going to happen but before it started, I turned my attention to the drunken instigator, the one who was taunting the over-muscled and greased up Jersey Shore cast member. Shit, I thought. I think I know that guy.

Please, please, please let me get what I want

2010-01-21T10:20:00.000-05:00

Just a few updates from Stately Tressel Manor:

If it seems like I've been a little less than active, well, that's probably true. There are a couple of reasons.

* I completed work on my new novel, "Immortallo" in early December, and I've spent the last few weeks working on prepping the manuscript for publication, hopefully in late February, early March. Right now things are in the hands of members of my design team, so things like jacket design are up in the air right now. As we get closer to the release date, I'll share some excerpts and artwork. I'm really proud of this one, and I hope people like it as well.

*I'm trying to save up some creative energy for next month's RPM challenge. This is a yearly competition in which entrants must write and record 10 original songs during the month of February. I entered the contest last year (the songs can be heard on my music site, primarily here, here and here )and I'm looking forward to taking part again this year. I'll post links to the songs once they start showing up.

*After that, hopefully the weather will start to warm up a bit, and I'll be in a better writing mood, at which point I'll start work on the next novel, tentatively titled "Harry Swan and the @#$*%#**!!" We'll see how it goes.

*Republican Scott Brown's victory Tuesday in his bid for the late Ted Kennedy's senate seat really put me in a fowl mood yesterday, one that I decided to try and alleviate by raising my snark level to 11. I had a devilish amount of fun deriding Mr.Brown's supporters online yesterday, but probably took it a bit too far. I still hope that most of the people who voted for Mr. Brown were unaware of his anti-gay, anti-woman voting track record when they cast their ballots, and am disappointed that the Democratic party opted to run a robotic and anti-charismatic candidate who was nearly impossible for anybody to get excited about. But as I woke up this morning, determined to post today (initially I was planning to do another Listening Party entry) I just felt I need to dial back on the snark--snark which I feel has been particularly pervasive recently. That could change tomorrow, if I find myself listening to a Paula Cole record or something.

I LOVE THE SOUND OF BREAKING GLASS

2010-01-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

When you drop an old fashioned Coke glass, they bounce once and then shatter in mid-air. I know this because I have dropped at least a dozen old fashioned Coke glasses, and at least eleven of those were on purpose. I'm not sure when the statute of limitations on petty vandalism runs out, but it's been ten years, so I hereby confess to the Friendly's corporation: I broke those goddamn glasses on purpose just because I liked the way they broke.

I also facilitated the breaking of at least a dozen more, as during my very brief tenure as a Friendly's manager, I found that the best way to relieve an overly stressed employee (and at Friendly's most of the employees were teenage girls)was to invite them behind the restaurant and give them some Coke glasses to smash on the pavement. It always seemed to make everything feel better.

The first Coke glass broke by accident. I fell right from my hands, and I watched it fall in slow motion, the way things that you don't want to fall fall. Everytime thereafter, the glasses fell too fast. Gravity never lets you savor the fall when you're enjoying it.

It was a job I didn't want. It fell out of the sky. I had just left my last job after the general manager had tried to pull a "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" between me and the rest of the management staff over a missed place drop box, and my friend Keith and I went to the local Friendly's to flirt with the waitresses we knew there. And one of them--was it Rainee? Janine?--said it when they took away our ketchup stained plates. "Ryan, you should just come work here." And so I did.

About three minutes into my first shift I knew I was not a good fit. I think a person needs a certain temperament to work at a restaurant, and I don't think I had it. It was Pammy the fountain girl who made me promise not to quit. She made me pinky-swear on it. I was 20 years old, and she was 17. It wasn't as sordid as you think. So I stayed.

I wasn't really a very good manager. I don't think I succeeded in closing a night without some kind of food related mishap. There was a complicated series of steps for each food station, and I'd invariably forget one of them. I wouldn't cover up the cheese, or I'd forget to refresh the soft serve machine. These weren't really little things. I think everybody's fear when they go out to a place like Friendly's is that somebody left the cheese out all night, or that they let the mayonnaise spoil. Like I said, I was ill-suited for the job.

But I did a pretty good job at managing the restaurant itself. I was really good at making unsatisfied customers--those dads who threaten to walk out without paying for anything because the waitresses were too slow, their kids' food was served cold--calm down and stay. I was also really good at managing the staff, and when one of those 16-year old waitresses had been yelled at by a customer, and she would be crying in the back, begging me to drop off the bill for her, I'd tell her she needed to do it, that it would make her feel better and stronger if she went out there and faced those customers and showed those mean bastards that they hadn't broken her.

And I'd ask her, when she was crying, when she threatened to quit, what would be the worst thing that could happen? "Nobody's going to die," I'd say. And then I'd take her out back to smash old fashioned Coke glasses.

Only once did my direct boss, Tina the general manager, indicate to me that she suspected anything nefarious about the broken glasses. But I had learned at an early age the power of misdirecting someone without lying. "We dropped them," I'd told her, and that was 100% the truth. We did drop them. Over and over again. Until our sides hurt from laughing.

I knew that I was basically taking money away from the Friendly's corporation. I knew that the glasses cost money and would need to be replaced. But I figured that the glasses were in some way some kind of hazard pay. On a busy night--especially a busy night where we were short-staffed: a usual recipe for late-night glass smashing--the company made more money while we made exactly the same. It was a small form of profit sharing. It was a tiny workers' revolt.

I guess it would seem different if we'd been taking cash out of the register. But we weren't. That would be wrong. And this, this glass smashing? How could something that felt so right be wrong?

Nobody was going to die.

I'd already decided I was leaving, putting in my notice, the night that the Pisser showed up at the door. It had been a crazy busy night--so crazy and hectic and short-staffed that we didn't even have an opportunity to unwind with some glass smashing--and a man knocked at the front door after we had closed. He had a bad mustache, a silk dress shirt unbuttoned too far, black trenchcoat, and a curly mullet. "I need to use your bathroom," he said, standing at the glass door at the front of the restaurant.

I didn't open the door, just kind of yelled to him through the glass. I told him we were closed.

"I need to use the bathroom," he repeated.

Our Friendly's was literally surrounded by bars that were still open.
"Why don't you go use the restroom at Bob's?" I said, pointing to the local bar adjacent to us.

He told me he had had a problem with the bouncer there and couldn't go back in. I think I must've known he was drunk before this point, but this was where I really noticed how much he was swaying.

"I need to use your bathroom or I'm going to be sick," he told me. "I've got a condition."

I apologized and told him I couldn't let him into the restaurant after we had closed.
He closed his eyes for a second, like he had fallen asleep standing up, then reopened them slowly.

"Remember this face," he said, pointing to his bad mustache. "Remember this face."
His fist came out of nowhere. "BECAUSE THIS IS THE FACE OF THE MAN WHO IS GOING TO F*** YOU UP!" he yelled as he shattered the glass door with his fist. I instinctively fell backwards as the glass rained down onto the floor. He ran off into the night.

He wasn't a very adept criminal. The police caught him an hour or two later. I had to go to the police station at 1:45am to make an ID. He was sitting in a room, virtually passed out, his fist wrapped in bloody bandages, his mullet and mustache still intact.

"That's him," I told the officer.

"Are you sure?" he asked me.

I nodded. "He told me to remember his face."

It was a good line, one I couldn't wait to repeat at his trial, which I later received two summons for. I imagined leaning into the microphone at the moment when his defense attorney asked me the question. "Are you sure this is the man you saw that night?"

Dramatic pause. "Yes. He told me to remember his face."

I ended up sitting in Brockton superior court on two separate mornings just to listen to his lawyer ask for a continuance. I only found out months later, after I'd stopped working at Friendly's, that he eventually plead guilty and had to send Friendly's $20/a month until he had paid for the repair to the door. I never got my moment in court.

Some other stuff happened that night--some real Keystone Cops moments with the Bridgewater PD, trying to explain the situation to the night cleaning crew who only spoke Portuguese. An old acquaintance showed up at some point while I was waiting for the police, having taken some bad acid and in need of someone to talk her through it.

I spent a lot of time that night on the phone with the general and regional managers, filling them in on what had happened. It was late at night, I imagine I had woken both of them up, but they didn't seem to grasp what my biggest concern was. We had no front door. The whole door was glass, with the exception of a metal bar across the middle for pulling and pushing the door open, and all that glass was lying in the entrance way.

"Just hang a sign on the door," Tina said.

I tried to explain that there was no way to keep anybody--or any animals--from just walking into the restaurant by just climbing either under or over that center bar.
"Just hang a sign on the door," she repeated.

I think I worked there for another month. I thought about just never going back, but I had pinky-sworn to stay, and so I did.

A day or two later I went to work and the glass had been replaced. I guess there would have been some dramatic irony in me being there the day they replaced the front glass door--representing, perhaps, all the glass I myself had broken--but I wasn't. Like I said, it wasn't a job I was really that invested in.

My Favorite Christmas Things

2009-12-21T12:43:00.000-05:00

In no particular order:

*Listening to Roger Waters' "Amused to Death" in the dark, Christmas night, 1992.

In the olden days, my father would bring us to his aunt and uncle's house in Melrose for Christmas dinner, and give us our Christmas gifts when we got home. Melrose was probably an hour away, and we'd usually stay late, so we wouldn't get home until 10 or 11 o'clock at night. In 1992, my dad gave me "Amused to Death" the new solo record from Pink Floyd's Roger Waters. I'd asked for it having seen a magazine ad for the album's cover, a monkey watching a TV set. I had never heard any of the songs, nor had I heard any Pink Floyd (although my friend Jesse would lend me a copy of 'The Wall' about a week before Christmas), but something about that album cover really grabbed me, so when I opened it up Christmas night, I went down into my dad's unheated basement to listen to it (that's where the stereo was--it had speaker hook-ups throughout the house, but my sisters were asleep) and I sat in the cold dark as monkeys screeched and little boys talked about war, and scared the shit out of myself.

*Reading "Arkham Asylum" by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, Christmas night 1989, 10pm-11:45 pmI don't think I've ever been so excited by a Christmas gift that ended up horrifying me so much. Released following the successful Batman movie, Arkham Asylum by Morrison and McKean is probably the most disturbing thing I'll ever read. Because when you are 10 years old, there are fewer disturbing things than reading a book on Christmas night about Batman stabbing himself in the hand with a shard of glass.

*Listening to "Fairytale of New York" on repeat at the Rockpile, Christmas Eve 2001

I used to work at a great used record store in my hometown, and I used to work Christmas Eve morning before my boss came in and the place basically turned into a Christmas Eve party for all his friends. I put this song on, probably the only song that reminds me of Christmas that is actually about Christmas, albeit a Christmas between a drunk and verbally abusive couple.

* Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge from the Simpson Christmas episode, Christmas 1995

The Simpsons have done several Christmas episodes, but this is my favorite. Bart really wants a particular videogame called "Bloodstorm" and after several attempts to earn the money, he instead shoplifts the game. It's actually a pretty heart-rending episode, as Marge discovers his larceny and feels like she doesn't even know her own son anymore. And while it does have a pretty sappy climax (Bart takes the money he's saved and has his portrait taken for her) the ending is maybe my favorite Christmas ending of all time. Marge gives Bart his gift--shaped like a video cartridge--and he opens it expecting Bloodstorm. Instead it is 'Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge'--Marge informs him that Bloodstorm was sold out. This kind of reminds me of me and my mom.

* Pretending "The Road to Ensenada" by Lyle Lovett was country music, Christmas season, 1998

I was involved with this girl who really loved country music (I remember she had a Garth Brooks boxset) and I was really, really, really trying to learn to like it, as almost a Christmas present to her. Lyle Lovett was about as far as I could go.

*"Sin City" by Frank Miller, Christmas night, 1992

I remember telling my father's older cousin asking me what I had asked for for Christmas, and when I told him a few CDs and a few comics, he asked me if they were those kind of comics with naked ladies in them. I said no, but when I finally got a chance to go home that night and read the first Sin City collection, which my father had gotten me for Christmas, well, Frank Miller made a liar out of me. That's a comic with a lot of naked ladies in it. And I think reading about a guy sawing off somebody's limbs and feeding to the dogs on Christmas night would have disturbed me more if I hadn't already read Arkham Asylum. I was growing up.
* The "Madonna" episode of MacGyver, Christmas, 1989

I loved MacGyver when I was like 9 or 10, and this Christmas episode, in which a statue of the Virgin Mary disappears, and the Boys and Girls club that MacGyver's friend works at is going to be closed, except they put on some kind of talent show that saves the club and oh, yeah, it turns out the Mary statue didn't disappear, it just turned into a bag lady who made MacGyver finally deal with the death of his mother, and you may say that I don't love Christmas, but I love this.

*The Fourfignewtons Shirt, Amherst MA, Christmas 1997

My friend Jess' birthday is about a week before Christmas, and I went to visit her in Amherst one year for it. She's a lover of really bad jokes, and I found this t-shirt with four fig newtons dancing in a chorus line, with the tag "fourfignewton" (play on the Volkswagon farfegnugen catchphrase) and then we went Christmas shopping in Northhampton, and I bought the really weird Joni Mitchell album where she included random recordings of people singing happy birthday to Charles Mingus and listened to it the whole long and cold ride back home.

*Watching Bob Dylan Unplugged, Christmas Eve 1994

Surprisingly, I don't think I had ever heard "Like A Rolling Stone" before, and this is the version I hear whenever I think of the song. My favorite bit, however, is Dylan's realization a few bars in that the band's instruments are out of tune. This raises the interesting question: If Bob Dylan can tell when things are out of tune, why has he been singing like that for forty years?

*Reading "Jack Kirby's Fourth World", Christmas 2008

For those who are unfamiliar with Jack Kirby, he created the Fantastic Four, Captain America, the Hulk, and the X-Men, as well as literally hundreds of other characters. But none of his work gives me as much joy as the Fourth World, a series of comics he did for DC in the early 70s. I had black and white reprints of most of them, but last Christmas crazily splurged and purchased all four hardcover collections of the work in color and in the proper order. There's really nothing Christmas-y about gods who look like Black olympic skiers and who collect the spirits of the recently dead. Or maybe there is?

*Watching "True Stories" on DVD, Christmas Eve 2000

I'd seen this movie back in the winter of 1992, and I probably could've included it then, but 1992 is pretty jammed packed. I got my first DVD player in 2000, and this was the first DVD I got to watch in it. It's the movie where David Byrne from Talking Heads puts on a bolo tie and makes fun of people from Texas for an hour and a half.
There's a part at the end of the movie, where Byrne as narrator talks about how he likes forgetting. Leaving a place, and you forget all the things and people and places, and so when you go back there you get to rediscover them all again. This is probably one of the central tenets of my life, and why I can listen to Bob Dylan flub the intro to 'Like A Rolling Stone' or reread a drugged-up Batman kicking a supervillian in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs, or listen to Roger Waters talk about how God wants TV and cash contributions, because during the year I forget all these things, which allows me to come back to them and rediscover them like I was 10, or 13, or 20, all over again.

That having been said, this year will be the first year my wife-to-be and I will be spending Christmas together, so I imagine in a few years, a list of my favorite Christmas things might look entirely different.

LISTENING PARTY: The Wall

2009-12-07T10:53:00.001-05:00

I don't know what it is about the early winter months that makes me nostalgic for overblown, bombastic, and pretentious rock albums. I figured I'd take a break from all that and listen to one of the least overblown, bombastic, and pretentious rock albums of all time. Pink Floyd's The Wall.

I have to admit that I had no idea who Pink Floyd was in the early days of December 1992, when my friend and bandmate Jesse let me borrow his copy of the wall, taped off of his father's vinyl. I subsequently dubbed a copy of that tape, which meant that for the first four years of listening to this album, it was on a twice-dubbed cassette copy of a 12-year old vinyl record. Meaning that, while 13-year Ryan listened to this album for the first time with the lights off in his bedroom, freaked out by all the strange noises and weird screaming that accompanied this album--due to the poor quality of the tape he had, there was still so much strange noise and weird screaming he couldn't hear.

"In the Flesh?"-So, if you're making an overly pretentious and overblown concept album, the first thing you need to do is record a piece of spoken dialogue and then split it in half and play the second half at the start of the record and the first half at the end, so that it creates a loop. I think Britney Spears did this same trick on "Oops, I Did It Again"

I have since read many books on Pink Floyd, a band that I have been fascinated with since that fateful December night 17 years ago when I first heard singer/composer Roger Waters barking out orders to the lighting crew before airplanes zoomed by and crashed. So I know a lot of the backstory behind the creation of this album: Waters' loss of his father in WWII, the slow descent into madness of Floyd's first singer, Syd Barrett, the increasing dehumanization of rock n' roll tours. But I knew none of that when I first heard this album. Instead, I thought I was going fricking crazy.

"The Thin Ice"- Yoko Ono's biggest solo hit was a song called "Walking on Thin Ice." I mention this because Roger Waters sings a little bit like Yoko Ono on this track. Which is to say not at all.

"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1"- This album was also my introduction to songs that had parts to them. In my youth, a song was a song, and then you'd just hear another one. But then Roger Waters came along and decided that songs were never finished, just replayed again later with slightly different lyrics and even more headache inducing vocals. This song ends with a long guitar coda overdubbed with sounds of children playing. This scared the shit out of me when I was 13 for some reason.

"The Happiest Days of Our Lives"- This song starts with a helicopter. I don't really know why. I also don't know why that this was its own song and not just the beginning to "Another Brick in the Wall, part 2" It's all about how teachers are mean to kids. Which means your seventh grade brother wrote it.

"Another Brick in the Wall part 2"-Somewhere, someone has written a 40-page dissertation on the way this song blends disco beats with the refrain "we don't need no education" but I don't want to read it, and neither should you. And the person who wrote it should be ashamed of themselves. This song is famous for its use of a children's choir on the second verse. Those kids were all paid for their services with a copy of the album. Roger Waters used the money he made off this record to buy a private island. I don't know what that means, except that while Roger Waters has gone to write and record several more rock operas and one for real opera, none of these school kids ever went on to record their own rock opera. So while we'll never know who was the real musical genius behind the Wall--Roger Waters or a group of 20 eight year olds--I think we can make an educated guess. What?

"Mother"-After hearing this song, I was terrible to my own mother for about five years. So I think Pink Floyd owes my mother an apology.

"Goodbye, Blue Sky"-This is a really beautiful song about a cat eating a bird. And then about some zombies.

Then there are two flowers raping each other.

"Young Lust"-I think this song reveals the brilliance of the collaboration between Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour. So this song is supposed to be about a young boy's grappling with his nascent sexuality in the grip of a controlling mother.
I feel like Gilmour took one look at the song title and said "'Young Lust'? My guitar knows how to do that." and turned Roger Waters lonely song about masturbation into one that was 100% about cock. That's magic, folks.

"One of My Turns"-This song starts with the mother from Leave it to Beaver playing an operator trying to reach Pink Floyd's wife. And some man answers, which leads Pink Floyd to bring a groupie back to his hotel room. And then the groupie talks about all the cool stuff that it's in the room. This lasts for about forty-five minutes. Then the song starts. Over a really 1979-esque synthesizer, Pink talks about feeling cold as a razorblade and tight as a tourniquet and dry as a funeral drum, and then the drums and guitars kick in, supposedly representing his freak-out. He asks the groupie if she's like to see his favorite ax. When I was 13, I didn't know that people referred to guitars as axes, and thus thought he had turned into a serial killer. Or a lumberjack.

"Don't Leave Me Now"-During this song he doesn't mention anything about trees or logs or how cold it is, so I'm thinking he's not a lumberjack.

"Another Brick in the Wall part 3"-I had to convince my mother to let me rent "Pink Floyd The Wall" the movie from our local video store because it was rated R. I'm pretty sure I saw it before Christmas, which was only about two weeks after Jesse lent me the album, but it seemed the longest two weeks of my life. I was desperate to see the film the band made about the album, and when I finally saw it, it was torturous. It felt like two whole weeks while I was watching it. I thought that maybe everything just felt like it took forever when I was 13, but last year I tried to watch 'The Wall' movie again, and after about four hours I stopped, unable to take anymore. And that only got me to the second roar of the MGM lion.

"Goodbye Cruel World"-This is the end of the first disc of the double album, and I wonder what someone would've thought if they bought this from like a used record store and it only came with the first disc. I'd ask them, but they probably have killed themselves due to extreme depression.
The stage show for this record involved a giant wall being built across the stage with this song being the one where Waters inserted the final brick. I actually think this is one of the coolest conceits for a rock n' roll show I've ever heard of, although I don't know how I'd feel as an audience member if the band I went to see didn't want to see me so much they built a wall in front of me.

"Hey You"- I remember I went with this girl named Jenny to a homeless shelter to volunteer, and when her mom was driving us, this song came on the radio, and Jenny said "Oh, Mom, I love this song! Turn it up!" and I decided this meant that she and I needed to get married. She went on to become a Patriots' cheerleader and I write about albums I listen to on a blog that nobody reads, so you can see how that turned out.

"Is there Anybody Out There?"-This is a mostly solo acoustic guitar piece. I'm sure if I went to the Wall show, this is where Floyd started throwing rotten fruit at the audience from over the wall.

"Nobody Home"-This is one of the most affecting songs on the album. And really, if you wanted to know what Roger Waters felt about the rock n' roll lifestyle, this song would do the trick. He talks about having the obligatory Hendrix perm, which someday, when I'm not too busy writing on this blog that nobody reads and wondering what Jenny is up to, I might go into a barber shop asking for the obligatory Hendrix perm just to see what might happen.

"Vera Lynn"/"Bring the Boys Back Home"- These two songs are really one song, which is all about WWII. Roger Waters is meant to connect rock n' rollers going out onto tour with young men going off to battle the Nazis. One group saved Europe from self-destruction. The other made it cool to wave around lighters and dayglo sticks in the air and yell out "Freebird." I'm not one to pass judgment.

"Comfortably Numb"- This is probably the most famous song from this album, and is probably tied with "Money" to be the most famous Pink Floyd song of all time. Which is funny, because it's all about getting a hyper-cortisone shot before going onto stage to perform in a giant stadium rock show. That really boils down the universality of the Wall to its core, doesn't it?

This performance is from 2005, the final performance of Pink Floyd ever, and the first time the original (well non-Syd Barrett original) members played together in 25 years. I mention this because for all the fun I'm poking at this record, seeing this band reunite after so many years was a big deal to me, even though I was an adult. It was a great moment. Even though David Gilmour looks a little bit like Skeletor.

"The Show Must Go On"- You wouldn't know it from the liner notes (the liner notes don't even mention the band's drummer,Nick Mason, so I'd hardly call them comprehensive) but this song features background vocals from Toni Tennille, from the Captain & Tennille. Which might be the scariest thing about the whole record.

"In the Flesh"- A reprise of the album's opening track, this time without the question mark, and with added racial slurs. There's some business when you watch the film that Pink Floyd (the character, not the band) has turned in a fascist. Which I guess is cool. I mean, I'd guess I'd rather have a rock star pretend to be a fascist then pretend to be a socialist, like when John Lennon tells us to imagine no possessions when he's playing an ivory grand piano in his mansion.

"Run Like Hell"- At this point in the record/movie/Roger Water's life, things are so bleak I applaud all of us for keeping on.

"Is there anybody weak in the audience?" We're all weak, Roger.

"Waiting for the Worms"-There's actually an interesting point to be made with the central metaphor of this song, about how isolating ourselves from the world makes us vunerable to the decay of self-doubt. The problem is if you weren't isolated from the world before you listened to this record, you probably would be by the time you got to this song. Although I suppose it's better than another Captain and Tennille song, I suppose.

"The Trial"- I can't even imagine being a Pink Floyd fan during this time, having grown up with the band since the late 60s. Getting stoned and listening to Ummagumma or Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun getting to the end of this record and hearing them performing a Gilbert & Sullivan number about dueling toothed vaginas.
And giant balls.

Somewhere there is a cassette tape featuring the band I was in when I was 13 performing a cover of this song. This alone will prevent me from ever running for public office.

"Outside the Wall"-At this point in the show, the giant wall would be torn down, showering lightweight cardboard bricks on the audience, followed by this quiet melodica-driven song. On the tape I had, the sound quality was bad, I don't think I even heard this song at all the first few times I listened to the album. I was still thinking about the raping flowers, and giant toothed vaginas, and how rock music turned you into a nazi, and I just pulled the covers over my head.

LISTENING PARTY: Bat Out Of Hell III

2009-11-23T09:13:00.000-05:00

Francis Ford Coppola decided, after almost two decades, to return to the Godfather movies. The first two were and are among the most critical acclaimed movies in American history, so who could argue with a Godfather part III? FFC wrote a script, signed all the principals (Al Pacino, Diane Keaton) and hired the talented Winona Ryder to play the key role of Mary, Michael Corleone's daughter. But weeks before shooting was to start, Ryder got sick and dropped out of the picture, and FFC replaced her with his young, inexperienced daughter.

I mention this because Meatloaf also decided to make his Bat out of Hell series a trilogy, and when his collaborator and songwriter Jim Steinman quit the project, Meat was forced to hire Francis Ford Coppola's daughter to fill in. Well, not quite, but Bat Out of Hell III is a weird hybrid creature; Meatloaf found a few older Steinman songs lying around (including a few from an unproduced Batman musical, and one from a Celine Dion record) and then filled them in with songs that sound like they were only written because Winona Ryder got sick.

"The Monster's Loose"- This song is written by Nikki Six and John 5. I think that first guy is from Motley Crue, and that second guy is the robot from Short Circuit. Which would explain the fact that the music sounds like heavy metal-lite music, with lyrics that seem like its author was taught human emotion from Steve Guttenburg.

This song also serves as the album's subtitle. Any album that needs a subtitle is definitely in trouble. It would've been like if Bat II was subtitled "The Wrath of Khan."

"Blind as a Bat"- This song is also not written by Jim Steinman. It was written by Desmond Child, who co-wrote "Living On A Prayer" with Bon Jovi. However, unlike that song, Blind as A Bat doesn't make me want to rollerskate around Skatetown. It doesn't even make me want to be blind as a bat so much as it makes me want to be deaf as Marlee Matlin. I do want to give Meatloaf credit for singing his heart out on this song. I give him credit for really committing to it, like award-winning actor Raul Julia did when he appeared in 'Street Fighter' with Jean Claude Van Damme.

"It's All Coming Back To Me Now"- Ah, the first of the Steinman scraps. This came from a Celine Dion album. His duet partner, Marion Raven, is not, as I imagined when I first listened to it, the girl from 'That's So Raven', which ruins whatever tiny enjoyment I got from the song. I do remember one of the few bits of pre-publicity buzz this album got was due to the fact that Meat had apparently asked Scarlett Johansen to sing this with him and she turned him down. She went on to record an album of Tom Waits' songs. Winner? Nobody.

"Bad for Good"- Our second Steinman scraps, and dear god, I thank you that this album exists just for this one song. I believe it comes from Steinman's solo album, when Jim Steinman, the she-male who wrote all of Bat Out of Hell decided he didn't need Meatloaf's voice and charisma to make his overblown and creepy songs less overblown and creepy. He just embraced their overblown and creepiness. The best part of this song? Well, that's like asking which atom of the sun makes you the warmest, but the thing that I love particularly about this song at this moment is that they recruited Brian May from Queen to record lead guitar on this song. Combining Meatloaf and Queen is almost too much to handle. If Phil Spector had produced it, this song would've been so rock n' roll decadence that it would've crushed the earth and all life on it. But the combination of Meatloaf's voice, May's guitar, and Steinman's "You think that I'll be bad for just a little while, I know that I'll be bad for good" chorus hook, is enough awesome to make my bones ache. This is the one song on the album that feels 'Bat Out of Hell'-ish even a little bit. Part of the reason for that is this song is copyright 1979, before being a sexless freak had completely embittered Jim Steinman. That's actually probably the only reason, now that I think about it.

"Cry Over Me"-Having run out of Steinman scraps for the time being, Meat turns to songwriter Diane Warren, who also wrote 'I Don't Want to Miss A Thing' for Aerosmith. This might be the moment where you look around and think "Meatloaf's here, the album's called 'Bat Out of Hell', there's a bad painting of a guy on a motorcycle with a sword fighting a giant bat....why does it all feel so wrong?" and the answer, again, is that THIS SONG IS BY THE WOMAN WHO WROTE THE THEME SONG TO ARMAGEDDON. If an asteroid smashed into my house right now while I'm listening to this song, I'm afraid I'd deserve it.

"In the Land of the Pig, the Butcher is King"- STEINMAN! STEINMAN! STEINMAN! Oh, thank you Jim Steinman, for not only writing an unproduced Batman musical, but for also leaving the sheet music laying around for Meatloaf to find. So I think this song is written from the Joker's point of view, or something. You'd think the combination of Jim Steinman and Batman would be as awesome as the Steinman/Queen combo, but I guess Prince's "Batdance" has ruined me forever.

"Monstro"- What? No. Instrumentals? I feel like they made this in the hope they could get Jim Steinman to come in and do his creepy spoken word thing, about I'm a big whale and I'm going to swallow you and then you'll have to light a fire inside me and I'll sneeze you out, but, like, sexually. And then Jim didn't show up.

"Alive"- It does segue way into the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Oh, wait, no, still Meatloaf. Is this song also written by Johnny 5? ("Johnny Five...alive!") No. This song is written by four people, which outside of a band situation, just strikes me as too many people. If it takes four people to write a song this generic, maybe it means that the idea for the song wasn't that good to begin with. I hate that I can't direct my disappointment toward Jim Steinman. I could have so much fun picking on him for looking like Cloris Leachman when she first wakes up in the morning, but now I have a bit of begrudging respect for him deciding not to take part in this deal. And I don't want to blame Meatloaf. I'm so conflicted.

"If God Could Talk"- He'd say, 'Stop making Bat Out of Hell III.'

"If It Ain't Broke, Break It"- Oh, Steinman, I'm sorry for how much I picked on you during Bats I & II. It doesn't mean I want to hang out with you or anything. This song is also from your unproduced Batman musical, and while it isn't objectively good in any way, I love it still because it's YOURS.

I mean, it's total shit, but it's YOURS.

"What About Love"-Ah, the last non-Steinman song. It's also written by four people. Steinman must sit around listening to his complementary copy of this album, brushing his long, white hair and just laughing that it takes four people to even try and write a Bat Out of Hell song. And then he takes out his Batman action figures and starts using them to perform his Batman musical.

"Robin, quickly! To the Tony Awards!"

"Seize the Night"-Another Batman musical number. Since I've kind of made a truce with Jim Steinman, I'll just include some scenes I'd like to see in the Batman musical if it ever comes to pass.

"The Future Just Ain't What it Used to Be"-

"Cry to Heaven"- Here I am. I've nearly completed my look at the Bat Out of Hell trilogy. I don't know if there will ever be a Bat Out of Hell IV (although my guess is that if Meatloaf invested his 'Bat' money in the stock market, the answer is yes) but if not I'm disappointed that the whole thing ended without the giant bat getting his comeuppance. You can't just go and grab big-breasted women in chain-mail and make guys ride enchanted motorcycles to get them back too many times before you get your comeuppance. So if I could implore Meatloaf and Steinman to reunite one last time to write and record one more song in which the motorcycle guy finally defeats the giant bat. Steinman, you can probably just use that song from the 'Beowulf' musical I'm sure you've got kicking around somewhere. Just don't let it end here. That motherlovin' bat's got it coming.

To be continued....?

LISTENING PARTY: Bat Out Of Hell II

2009-11-20T10:18:00.000-05:00

So you're watching the Meatloaf "Behind the Music" and you've just watched the part where, following several commercial flops in the United States, Meat is forced to play small bars in Poland to make ends meet. And then the narrator says, "But the winds were about the change for Meatloaf" and then they show clips from the music video from "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" and you find yourself wondering: if things were turning around for Meatloaf, why does he look like a Morlock?

"I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)"- True story: this song made its premiere when I was a freshmen in high school, and they played it at the first couple of school dances that year. They still also played Paradise by the Dashboard Light, meaning that there was only enough time left to play three other songs before it was 11pm and time to go home, but there you go. But there was a student teacher there who was really trying to be hip with all the kids, so he asked me when this song started playing, "What is it that Meatloaf won't do for love?" and I answered "Oral sex" and then he stopped trying to be my friend, and then started grading my papers for Geography really hard. I wish I could tell you that the intervening 16 years have given me greater insight into this song, but despite the fact that it is over 12 minutes long, most of the song is just Meatloaf repeating the title over and over again. So yeah, I guess I'm going to go with oral sex.

"Life is A Lemon (And I Want My Money Back)"-One way that I know that the reunited Steinman/Meatloaf team is completely self-unaware: they start out the second song on this album with background singers chanting "I want my money back", almost like they were echoing the millions of people who bought this album because they loved the first Bat Out of Hell. It just seems like a dangerous idea to implant the idea of refunds because merchandise (life in the song, the album in real life) has not delivered what it promised. This album promised me fun, bombastic rock n'roll songs about not getting laid. And apparently a guy on a floating motorcycle punching a giant bat. You've still got nine chances, Meat. Don't let me down.

"Rock N'Roll Dreams Come Through"- I think there're few things I hate more than songs about the transformative power of rock n'roll songs. Because honestly, music clearly is something that is very important to me. But I don't believe that "Cat Scratch Fever" ever really saved anybody's life. In this song, rock n'roll dreams help you get through the fires of hell. But then there's a soprano sax solo. So I'm just getting conflicted messages all over the place from this song. And since it is longer than Das Boot, they're just going to keep on coming. If only I had a good rock n'roll song to listen to that would change my life.

Yeah, sorry Meatloaf, this song is definitely not doing it. The only Rock N'Roll Dream I have now is that this song were six minutes shorter.

"It Just Won't Quit"- If you're talking about this album, then, yeah, no shit.

"Out of the Frying Pan (Into the Fire)"- WHAT.THE.HELL.IS.WITH.ALL.THE.PARENTHESIS. ON.THIS.ALBUM. Also, Jim-fucking-Steinman, give your audience some credit. If the song is called "Out of the Frying Pan", anybody who is older than seven will understand that you leave the frying pan and end up in the fire. You don't need to spell it out for them. Or do you? You seem like a guy who needs help with the obvious. For example, things I thought were self-evident that you seemingly don't get: rock songs really shouldn't go much beyond six minutes, and that's only if you've written Kashmir. So your need to write songs longer than a Republican filibuster every time is really starting to piss everybody off.

"Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are"-I wrote about this last week while I was listening to Pearl Jam, so I don't have too much to say about it, other than it's really damn long, and while the title is pretty apt, having Meatloaf repeat it eleventy-zillion times kind of robs it of a lot of its poignancy. Also robbing the song of its poignancy? The image of the girl you're having sex with in the backseat of your car "rising up like an angel rising out of a tomb." I mean I guess the word 'angel' is nice, but man, there are few words that are bigger boner killers than 'tomb.'

"Wasted Youth"- Jim Steinman loves his spoken word intros. On Bat I, he was a werewolf or something. So here, because excess is the keyword of the day, he doesn't do a spoken word introduction, he has his own spoken word track. (Which I think might've been something Meatloaf pushed for so that way people could just skip over it.) So he's not a werewolf here, but I guy who gets some kind of magically enchanted guitar that "moaned like a horny angel" and "howled in heat" and instead of using it to become a famous rock n'roll star, which I feel is the plot of at least two Corey Haim movies, he decides instead to go around and kill people with it. At one point he violently screams about smashing the guitar against the body of a varsity cheerleader, which makes me sad, because in 1993 Jim Steinman was probably close to fifty years old, and he's still angry that girls from high school wouldn't sleep with him, even though he looks like Jessica Tandy. The first Bat album was full of the kind of braggadocio of a guy who had never gotten laid (Remember that scene in the 40-year Old Virgin where Steve Carrell talks about how breasts feel like bags of sand? Every song about sex written by Jim Steinman sounds like that) but this second one just has some kind of angry sadness to it. This spoken word song starts with Steinman growling, "I remember everything" and I just want to tell him that maybe that's his problem. Also? Still no giant bat punching. F-minus.

"Everything Louder Than Everything Else"-This is my favorite Meatloaf song, hands down. When I was taking AP Calculus in high school, I used to put this song on repeat when I was taking practice tests, much to the consternation of my classmates. But this song is the perfect song to get you pumped up to spend three hours taking integrals. I'm not sure that's the effect that Jim Steinman was going for, but at this point in the album he's probably getting arraigned for beating cheerleaders to death with his guitar, and I hope they throw the book at him.

"Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)"-Do you know how annoying your need to use parenthesis on every title to spell out everything to your audience is?(Very annoying.) This song is probably the closest in spirit to those from the first Bat album. The tone isn't angry, like many of the other songs on this album, but instead doing that bragging thing about how awesome loose women are that only shows that you've never actually been within six feet of real lady parts. At some point, Meat sings about getting erotically burned, and while I'm not going to pretend that I'm some kind of sex expert, I think one thing that the phrase "erotically burned" denotes is that you have no idea what sex is like. That this song also contains a bass solo denotes that you have no idea what good music is like, either.

"Back Into Hell"-This is a synthesizer instrumental. I'm guessing this is where the giant bat gets punched.

"Lost Boys and Golden Girls"- I would literally sell my soul for this song to be about Estelle Getty and Bea Arthur. But it's not. If the first Bat Out of Hell record was meant to capture the anticipation of sex, then maybe this one represents first consummation: long, awkward, and totally disappointing.

LISTENING PARTY: Bat Out Of Hell

2009-11-15T11:31:00.000-05:00

There's one week a year, usually in late October-mid November, that we call "Stoked for the Loaf" week at Stately Tressel Manor. It's the week where, inexplicably, I become enamored with the recorded ouvre of Marvin Lee Aday, known the world over as Meatloaf. To most youngsters, Meat is just that guy with the man boobs in Fight Club, but he also has probably the most impressive trilogy in recording history with his Bat Out Of Hell series. I know what you're saying; There aren't that many trilogies in recording history, and while it's true that nobody was clamoring for "Use Your Illusion III", we shouldn't let Axl Rose's shortcomings overshadow the 'Loaf's achievement.
Now I've resisted doing Meatloaf for several reasons. 1)I'm never really sure if Meatloaf is taking himself all that seriously, which means making jokes at his expense are really jokes at my expense. And I hate anything that makes me look bad. That kind of funnels into reason two. 2) I don't know how openly I should flaunt my love of Meatloaf. Because when I do these livebloggings, I only do them for albums that I have genuine affection for. I wouldn't pick on an album I didn't think was good somehow. So, by the very nature of doing a Meatloaf album, I'm admitting that I think Meatloaf albums are somehow good. Which is only partially true. The truth is that I think Meatloaf albums are totally awesome. 3) Since the songs are so frigging long, I worry that I might run out of things to say in the twelve minutes it takes Meat to finish singing "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." But here we go: I figure if Meat can sustain enough energy to perform two hours worth of these songs being two hundred pounds overweight, I should certainly be able write about some of them for forty-four minutes being twenty pounds overweight.

"Bat Out Of Hell"- Oh god, we're only four measures into this song and I'm already tired. I think you can pick up on Jim Steinman and Meatloaf's theatre background in the way the song opens with an overture. By the time we're forty seconds into this album we've already heard six hundred different musical ideas, all of which are about sexual braggadocio. Which is pretty funny when you consider the album was written by Jim Steinman:

And produced by Todd Rundgren:

two of the most lady-looking dudes I've ever seen. I mean, really Jim Steinman looks like he just came from wherever that place is that old ladies go to have sex with old bikers. And I mean that he's the old lady. Because he looks like an old lady. Meatloaf also had long hair at the time, but he's sensibly realized that old hair on men doesn't look that great. I guess luckily for Jim Steinman he's really an old woman.
And looking at Todd Rundgren reminds me of a story from when the band Hanson first appeared on the scene: we were all tooling on Hanson, and then our bass player said, "Yeah, but the lead singer is pretty hot," not realizing that the lead singer of Hanson was in fact a boy. I mention this because I have to admit that looking at Todd Rundgren turns me on. Because he looks like a girl.

So the point is that I can see the combination of two guys who looked like girls and a guy who looks like he ate a middle linebacker needing to prove their manliness. So they do it with the maybe the gayest sounding rock n'roll songs about men getting it on with ladies of all time.

"You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)" I hate songs that have parenthesis in their titles. There's no place for parenthesis in rock n' roll, unless you're doing a Works Cited page. So what's the point of the parenthesis in this case? What was so important to Jim Steinman about it being a hot summer night that it needed to be added to the title? My other favorite thing about this song is Jim Steinman's spoken word introduction: because if there's anything that rock songs need less than parenthesis, it's spoken word introductions. But Steinman loves them, so he starts this song with something about werewolves, and virgins offering him shit under the full moon light, like her throat. I don't know. It grosses me out to think about it, especially because I think this is how Jim Steinman talks to girls all the time. So you couple that with the fact that he looks like Karen Black in Children of the Corn IV, you can imagine that he doesn't get a lot of ladies. Which would explain why in the songs he writes it sounds like he's never heard a woman talk before, because it's clear he never has.

"Heaven Can Wait"-This is ballad about Warren Beatty. I think. Or about not getting laid.

"All Revved Up and No Place to Go"- Wait, another song about not getting laid. This is really making me reconsider what exactly they mean by "Bat Out of Hell." For the record, I think that Meatloaf, even being overweight, got revved up but then got to go places. Sexually. The man has an animal charisma. I think he did okay with the ladies. Probably because he wasn't always approaching women with tortured metaphors about I'm a werewolf and my penis is a motorcycle.

"Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" -I love this song. I love it despite the fact that Steinman has Meat tell a girl that he's crying icicles instead of tears. I love it despite the fact that the verses seem to indicate that the girl isn't in love with our protagonist, but the chorus makes it seem that the guy is all about hooking up but doesn't want to commit. (I want you, I need you, I'm never going to love you, so two out of three ain't bad.) I love it even though in almost any endeavor except baseball , two out of three is kind of bad. It's a 66.67%, which is not enough to transfer it to a four year accredited college. (Okay, by the second go around, the chorus starts out by explaining that the girl is telling him that she's never going to love him, which makes more lyrical sense--as much lyrical sense as one can find on a Meatloaf album.)

"Paradise by the Dashboard Light"- When I was in high school, they played this song at every high school dance. There was this really beautiful girl named Santina, and she and I would command the dance floor every time the DJ threw it on. The dance basically consisted of Santina busting out some really sweet moves, while I stood about three feet away from her doing my best middle-aged Dan Ackroyd impression. You know, just swinging my arms and snapping my fingers, occasionally moving my feet. And by the end I would be exhausted.

By the Phil Razzutto part, where he makes the not even slightly obscured sexual references, I'd basically be laying on the floor, gasping for breath, while Santina strutted around my winded corpse. We performed this at every dance throughout high school, but she never wanted to go out on a date with me. Looking back now, the fact that I was as in-shape as a 55-year old Dan Ackroyd who didn't have the stamina to make it through an entire Meatloaf song might have had something to do with it. But luckily for everybody involved, I realized that, and didn't do anything crazy, like write an overblown rock opera about it and then entice my overweight friend into performing it.

"For Crying Out Loud"- I kind of forgot how short albums that originally appeared on vinyl are. Limited by the format, they usually top out at 40 minutes. So now we're almost to the end of Bat Out of Hell, and you get the sense that if only they had a full 72 minutes that compact discs offer, Steinman and Meat could really explore the depths of the guys who don't get laid phenomenon. But as they were hampered in by only forty minutes, they decide to end the album with this solo piano piece that really encapsulates, rather succinctly--oh, shit here comes the Philharmonic Orchestra. This isn't going to be over anytime soon. Well, hopefully, they will use it tastefully and subtly--oh wait, Meat just asked the girl if she can see his Levi's busting apart. And now here comes the glockenspiel. We're none of us escaping with our dignity intact with this one. I just checked the liner notes, and this song is performed by BOTH the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Because if there's one thing a song about blue balls needs, it's TWO fricking orchestras playing at the same time. And I think that might be the ultimate metaphor to describe Bat Out of Hell.

And it gets worse with the sequel.

LISTENING PARTY: Radio KAOS

2009-11-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

I think that what the world needs more of is sci-fi concept albums. I know that we all have our favorites: Kilroy was Here by Styx, 2112 by Rush, Psychoderelict by Pete Townsend, that album that Isaac Asimov recorded with Rage Against the Machine. But my favorite, by far, is Roger Waters' Radio KAOS. And it's not because it's the story of a paraplegic boy interfacing with the world's computer systems to threaten the world with nuclear annihilation. It's not because Roger Waters believes in the power of a radio DJ to save humankind. It's because he believes that the soundtrack of the future is white English guy funk.

"Radio Waves"- There are some concept albums that have a loose concept that you really can only glean from reading the liner notes and interviews with the artist (e.g. any album Tori Amos has ever released)and there are some that act like a soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist, with the concept hinted at with interstitial material between the songs (The Wall, before The Wall movie existed) and then there's "Radio Waves", where Roger Waters just tells us about Billy in his wheel chair, picking up radio waves through the computer system that allows him to communicate. This isn't really enough to fill up an entire four minutes, so Waters just spends the rest of the time naming US cities. Highlight: when he sings "Oklahoma City" and then lets out a 'Yeah!' after it.

"Who Needs Information?" So we get our first snippet of dialogue before this song, where DJ Jim Ladd plays DJ Jim Ladd who takes a call from Billy. Billy tells him he's from the Valley, and when Ladd thinks he means San Fernando, Billy calls him a schmuck and tells him that he meant Wales. Isn't that kind of a ridiculous thing to expect a DJ in L.A. to guess? It would be like I told you I spent the day in the city, and you, knowing I live in Southeastern Massachusetts, guess that I meant Boston, and I was all like, "No, The Emerald City of Oz! Jesus, you douche!" Okay, the song's about halfway over and I still haven't even started talking about it yet. Waters gives us a snippet of information about the plot of Radio KAOS, which somehow involves Billy watching his brother throw a cinderblock or something off an overpass. That's like two lines in the whole song, the rest of which is just typical Roger Waters-I hate everybody especially everybody else from Pink Floyd that isn't me. And it segues, rather unconvincingly from R&B background vocals, and a lite funk horn part into a Welsh choir. Because I always put those two things together. Just like I put together the plot from 'My Left Foot' with 'War Games.'

"Me or Him"- Let's slow things down here guys. Let's enter ballad territory and explain a little bit more about where everybody's coming from. So, apparently, after throwing a cinder block off an overpass, Billy's brother gets sent to jail. I don't know what he was expecting. Like, I've heard of people spitting off an overpass, but a cinderblock is just a whole other level of douchery. So Billy, all sad that his cinderblock throwing brother is in jail, decides to start calling into radio shows, and apparently he becomes so popular that people all over the world tune in to listen to him. Which seems about as likely as someone from Wales starting WWIII, so you can see that the window of disbelief is closing rapidly. This doesn't really work very well as a concept album because so much shit is happening, so much backstory needs explaining. That's why the best concept albums have such simple concepts. You know when your mother sees a really complicated movie, and she starts trying to explain it to you, and it doesn't make any sense because she just tells you snippets and forgets to fill you in on the most important parts. Now imagine if she wasn't your mother, but instead was the former bass player of Pink Floyd. And imagine while she's telling you about it, a competent but lifeless band played lite funk tunes behind her. There, I just saved you $8.99.

"The Powers That Be"-So three songs into his eight-song masterpiece, Roger Waters has decided to abandon the storyline he's been building so compellingly to throw in a song about how the world is run by a powerful cabal of leaders and businessmen who don't care about the common man, common men who can communicate with complex computer systems with their brains. And then he's decided that Mike & the Mechanics isn't going to steal his thunder, so he invites Paul Carrack to sing much of the lead vocal on this track. I wouldn't be surprised if that makes this the most successful song of Roger Waters solo career, because Carrack also sang lead on Squeeze's biggest hit, "Tempted." Which I think was about packing toothbrushes and combs and also about Cold War politics. I THINK.

"Sunset Strip"- I can't believe this song is written by the same guy who wrote "Animals." Because it sounds like mid-80s Don Henley. Except instead of the smooth California vocal stylings of the Eagles, it's sung by someone who sounds like one of the weird angry Muppets who used to appear on early Saturday Night Live.

"Home"-Okay, we've only got three songs left, and the plot hasn't really moved in two songs, and Waters includes a long DJ bit about different kinds of fish. I've struggled to tie it in as a metaphor for what's happening on the album, but it seems more like a private joke between Roger Waters and Jim Ladd. Although that seems unlikely, since can you picture Roger Waters being part of an private joke? This guy has only laughed once, and that was only the scary maniacal laugh at the end of "The Dark Side of the Moon." Also, we just passed my favorite part of the whole album, when Waters sings "Cowboys and Arabs" and he double tracks it, because it needs to be highlighted. I'm assuming Cowboys are the U.S. and Arabs are well, Arabs. This song also has nothing to do with the over-plot dealing with Billy's plan to annihilate the world because he's...bored? Pissed his brother was incarcerated for throwing a cinderblock off an overpass? Maybe he just hates the radio programming on radio KAOS. And since it seems to only play really lame lite-funk tunes by Roger Waters, maybe Billy's got a point. My second favorite of the whole album just passed by, too, where Waters sings "could be a baker, could a Laker, could be Kareem Abdul Jabar" which is the first time I've thought about Kareem since I was seven years old.

"Four Minutes"-Okay, right after "Home", Billy tells Jim Ladd that he's pressed the button, and Ladd laughs and hangs up on him. And then, for some reason, Ladd seems to really take it seriously, and starts to make announcements about the end of the world coming. A woman, it might be Clara Torres-who was the lady who orgasmed all over 'The Great Gig in the Sky' on Dark Side, is now orgasming all over this track, which is called four minutes to represent the four minutes I guess Waters thought we would have from when the Ruskies pushed the button and actual nuclear annihilation. I think a really good Twilight Zone episode would be if the button were actually pressed and then somebody sat down to listen to 'Four Minutes' and then halfway through just looked over at his wife or someone and said "Shit, it's really taking its time, huh?" Waters is really throwing out all the stops here, including using the sequencer part from 'On the Run' (again from Dark Side) as well as snippets of Margaret Thatcher speeches, and then it all builds to a crescendo: "Goodbye Billy," Jim Ladd says. And you think maybe the album is over. But you didn't count on one thing: Bob Geldof.

"The Tide is Turning (After Live Aid)"- Okay, as far as I can tell, Roger Waters was so moved by Live Aid, the big all day concert Bob Geldof put together to battle famine in Africa, that he wrote this song. And I guess I'm supposed to guess that Billy also saw Live Aid and then decided not to destroy the world after all. I have another hypothesis, though. Billy did destroy the world, and the afterlife is this song, over and over again. That's right, for our sins, we've all gone to Hell. This is probably the catchiest song Roger Waters has ever written, and I remember feeling moved when I watched his concert from the Berlin Wall, where he played the whole of "The Wall" one of my favorite albums of all time, and then closed out with this song, because after the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it did feel like the Tide was Turning, more so than Freddie Mercury rocking the crowd at Wembley Stadium with "Another One Bites the Dust" or something. Okay, so the song is winding down, and Roger Waters sings 'The Tide is turning' over and over again, and near the end, he says 'The Tide is turning, Billy', which of course is a reference to the main character of his thirty-seven minute epic (who has only like four lines, and isn't even mentioned in half the songs) but then, the very last line is "The tide is turning, sylvester." WHO THE HELL IS SYLVESTER? I have no idea. Is it the cat from those cartoons? Then who is Tweety? Who is the Old Lady? I think maybe I've missed Disc 1 of this album. This can't be it. But at the same time, I thank God that it is. Because I made it about thirteen minutes into this before I wanted to destroy the world. And scarily, it's actually an album I like. Especially since it includes this guy:

Who represents....maybe American imperialism? Or mutually-insured destruction? Or just cats with lisps?

LISTENING PARTY: Vs.

2009-11-11T08:58:00.000-05:00

The first time I remember hearing Pearl Jam was at Kim Volner's 13th birthday party.

It was a pool party, but I don't remember if I knew that, and so I wore a pair of jeans instead of swim trunks. Apparently at jerk school they teach you that that is a secret code that you want to be thrown in the pool, which I was--by some jerks-- and after being fished out of the water by a 13-year old girl, I wandered around in my sopping wet jeans until I sat down on a towel in Kim's basement. And I saw the video for "Jeremy" for the first time. Needless to say, I related.

But I've never really been able to relate to Pearl Jam since then. I can see why people like them, I certainly admire them for the decisions they've made as a band (I remember their valiant fight against Ticketmaster, which meant they played at out-of-the-way venues, like Lobster Hut) but I have never really been able to like them. But late in 1993, when they were releasing their second album, I felt they were such a part of zeitgeist that I needed to have it. But I hedged my bets. Because while I did pick up "Vs." (although my copy was one of the early pressings with no title, because PJ hadn't decided on one--oh, you iconoclasts!)I also picked up the new Squeeze album "Some Fantastic Place." I wanted to be cool, be on top of what was popular (and back then PJ was popular--at the time "Vs." broke the record for most albums sold in a single week) I was still the kid who wore jeans to a pool party, the kind of kid who was more excited about the new Squeeze album.

"Go"- Pearl Jam seemed at the time to favor one word song titles. Later on this very album they made "rearviewmirror" all one word, so I thought it was like a rule they had. How wrong I was. By the way, this song sounds like you'd expect a Pearl Jam song called 'Go' to go, which is totally different than how an R.Kelly song called 'Go' would go.

"Animal"- The chorus to this song is "I'd rather be with an animal" which is a pretty harsh thing to say to a person, unless you're Trent Reznor. Because he wants to fornicate with you like you were an animal. I say, let's just leave the animals out of this, shall we?

"Daughter"- This is the only Pearl Jam song your mom knows. It is also the only Pearl Jam likely to be heard at any Bat Mitzvahs.

"Glorified G"- Eddie Vedder's lyrics on this song are about as subtle as the most unsubtle thing you can think of. I'm very much pro-gun control, and I think if Veds and I ever sat down to talk politics, we'd get along very well. So would me and Noam Chomsky, but I wouldn't want to buy his album.

"Dissident"- So this is the story about a lady who keeps a dissident in her house for the night, but then turns him in when the authorities come. I knew cats who wrote songs about stuff like this. We used to pick them up and throw them in the pool.

"W.M.A."- Okay, I also agree with Eddie Vedder that institutionalized racism exists in the US. I agree that there is plenty of race-based police brutality. But the only thing getting beaten in this song is my head, and the thing that's doing the beating is Eddie Vedder's righteous indignation.

"Blood"-In the early 90s, Pearl Jam inspired approximately 1200 high school bands and every last one of them had a song called 'Blood'. Near the end of the track, you can almost hear Stone Gossard's dad wander down in the basement to tell them to keep the noise down because Aunt Carol is coming over.

"rearviewmirror"-I remember hearing this song and thinking it was the first Pearl Jam song that sounded like a song, and not just a collection of riffs with Eddie Vedder screaming about NAFTA. rearviewmirror has a lot of things that other songs have, like verses, and prechoruses, and choruses, a coda! It's like somebody got the band a book of musical terms for Christmas. Unfortunately, Meatloaf did this song so much better (and longer) with "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are" which just makes me wish I was listening to Bat Out of Hell II instead. Or Squeeze. Shit, I've made so many wrong decisions today.

"Rats"- I've never done this before, but I'm thinking about quitting. I don't think I can make it through the rest of this record. Because this song would be a million times more enjoyable if I could even get the sense that Eddie Vedder wasn't talking about metaphorical rats. Like, if he was singing a song about real rats, just filling you in on facts about rats. Did you know that rats can fit through a hole the size of a quarter? And any rat can jump as high as your face? I would enjoy a song like that a million times more, which is to say I wouldn't enjoy it all, since zero times a million is still zero, and that's how much enjoyment I'm currently deriving from this song: zero.

"Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town"- This is the other song from this record, along with "Daughter," that you are likely to still hear played on the radio today. I hate when this song shows up on the radio, not because the song is terrible (although it does sound like Pearl Jam straight up stole an outtake from R.E.M.'s 'Automatic for the People') but because it invites the DJ to make a comment about how long the song title is. Which just reminds me how much I hate DJ patter. Almost as much as I hate elderly women.

I'm sorry, I don't think I can bring myself to listen to the last two songs on this record. I thought this would be kind of fun, but it's been torturous. So instead I will listen to that Meatloaf song I mentioned earlier and one of the songs from the Squeeze album 'Some Fantastic Place'.

I love the idea that young Meat knew a kid who died while flying a bi-plane.

Oh, Squeeze, you make it all alright.

LISTENING PARTY: Magic & Loss

2009-11-03T07:41:00.000-05:00

The same day I purchased Mighty Like A Rose by Elvis Costello, I also picked up Lou Reed's Magic & Loss. God love the cut-out bin. This is Lou Reed's concept album about the deaths of the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus and an unnamed friend, both from cancer, both within a year of one another. This might be the hardest "Listening Party" for me to do because the subject matter of these songs is so deeply personal, so deeply heartfelt, and so deeply, deeply earnest. But then again, this is the haircut Lou was sporting at the time:

Somebody wants you to know this is a Getty image, apparently

"Dorita"- This is a serious album for serious people. Do you know how I know that? Because Lou starts it was an instrumental 'overture' or as he labels it "an invocation of the human spirit in music." Really, Lou? Because you know that wankcase who goes into Guitar Center just to play all the guitars with no intention of ever buying any of them? "Dorita" sounds a lot like his wanky guitar noodlings. The guys behind the counter at Guitar Center aren't impressed, and neither are we, Lou.

"What's Good"- Another reason I know this is meant to be a serious album for serious people is that each song has a subtitle. This one is called 'The Thesis.' I learned in ninth grade English class that you never tell your audience what your thesis is. But I never went to grad school, and I'm pretty sure Lou Reed did, and maybe that's what they tell you to do there. This is my favorite song on the album. The other day I mentioned a few quotes from Mighty Like A Rose that were contenders for my senior yearbook quote, and this song has one too: "Life's like sanskrit read to a pony; life's good, but not fair at all." It's probably the truest thing Lou Reed has ever written. Or at least tied with that bit in Walk on the Wild Side about that guy going down on other guys while dressed as a girl. Or all the songs about guys getting stabbed that he's written. But this is the most adult, thoughtful thing he's ever written, and he put it at the beginning of his thoughtful and adult album. It's all downhill from here.

"Power and the Glory Part I"- Reason number 3 why this is a serious album for serious adults is that it features songs broken up into parts. Like a classical piece of music. Or the Star Wars movies. Speaking of Star Wars, this song features the vocal stylings of jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott. I don't really know why he's here, other than Lou Reed thought he'd have Little Jimmy Scott sing on his record, and when you're making serious music for serious people you can totally just do whatever the hell you want. Also, if making pretentious music were some kind of video game, Lou Reed would've just gotten a dozen new lives for name-dropping 'Leda and the Swan' halfway through this song.

"Magician"- There's not a whole lot to say about this song, and I better save what little I do have to say because it's one of about six songs on this record that has practically identical music on it. I think you can get away with that when you're doing a concept album. For example, on Pink Floyd's 'The Final Cut' record, Roger Water sings the whole album on one note.

"Sword of Damocles"-So I was 15 when I heard this record for the first time and I bet Lou Reed thought that naming a song 'Sword of Damocles' would send a kid like me running to an encyclopedia (remember those?) to find out what he was referring to. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Burns made a reference--with visuals!!--to the Sword of Damocles, like, two years earlier. If the Simpsons had made me aware of the prevalence of using methamphetamine among cross-dressers, I don't think I would've needed Lou Reed at all. This song is probably the most tuneful on the record, and Lou Reed almost sounds like he's actually singing a few times.

"Goodby Mass"- Okay, so this is just Magician again, with different words. And a misspelled title. Who spells it 'Goodby'? I think one would pronounce that "gud-be" and maybe that's what Lou Reed wants us to do. The subtitle to this song is 'In A Chapel Bodily Termination.' Say what? Apparently when you're the legendary Lou Reed you don't need correct spelling or correct grammar. Oh my god this song did that thing where you totally thought it was over and then another verse started. It's probably not a surprise that a concept album about death would make me want to kill myself, but the surprise is how much it makes me want to kill myself.

"Cremation"- The subtitle to this one is 'Ashes to Ashes' which seems like maybe the typography guy switched the two of them up. This song is really pretty good. Lou probably should've just put out this song with 'What's Good' and 'Sword' and called it an EP. Or filled the B-side with feedback. I think I'll mention that Lou engaged the services of the great Rob Wasserman on bass for this album. Lou has usually had pretty good taste in bass players, which is good, because most Lou Reed songs only have two chords in them, so it's up to the bass players to make them sound different from each other.

"Dreamin'" Oh, Lou. No one will ever take you seriously if you start dropping g's off your words!

"No Chance"-This song is different than most of the other songs on this album. A few weeks later, I picked up Lou Reed's 'New York' album, and basically "No Chance" sounds like every song off of that album. So if you listen to song, you can basically skip 'New York'. And if you've ever heard 'Sweet Jane' and 'Perfect Day' you've basically heard every Lou Reed song ever written.

"Warrior King"- I've made it two and a half minutes into this song without having typed anything. I seem to remember liking this song a lot when I was 15. So I think I've spent the last two and a half minutes trying to figure out what was wrong with me when I was 15.

"Harry's Circumcision"- This is Lou Reed's song about a mohel.

"Gassed and Stoked"- This song's chorus is an operator telling you that this is no longer a working number, which I think was, in the early 90s, supposed to represent the finality of death: the person you are trying to call is dead, and that is why the number no longer works. But listening to it today, it just sounds like Lou's friend didn't pay his cell phone bill.

"Power and Glory Part II"- Do you know how sometimes you really like a movie, and then they make a sequel and it's terrible? Or how sometimes you really don't like a movie, and then they make a sequel anyways, and you can't believe anybody would want to see it, and then one night you flip past it on cable and it's unbelievably terrible? Guess in which way 'Power and Glory Part II' is terrible.

"Magic & Loss" aka 'The Summation.' This song is six minutes and thirty nine seconds long. I think, if you just listened to 'What's Good', 'Sword of Damocles' and 'Cremation' it would take you less time. So that might be my recommendation. Although I do like the last minute or so of this song, where I'm guessing somebody in the control booth signaled to Lou that maybe his concept album needed a big finish, so he dialed it up to '4'. Yes, this is a pretty low key album, and to be honest, I probably prefer the seven times he plays the song Magician with different lyrics to the other numbers where he tries unconvincingly to rock.
I read an interview with Lou about this record, where he said that it was supposed to be instructive, it was supposed to tell people how to deal with death. He hoped, in 1992, that other musicians would follow in his footsteps. He even made a suggestion: MC Hammer should do a concept album about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. If only Hammer had listened to ole Lou, we might have been spared 'Addams Family Groove.' After all, there are fates worse than death.

LISTENING PARTY: Mighty Like A Rose

2009-11-02T07:34:00.000-05:00

(Note: There are no Youtube videos for any of these songs, and trying to embed links to napster didn't work, so if you're curious what any of these songs sound like, you can listen to the entire album free here )
I've been thinking about Elvis Costello's Mighty Like A Rose a lot the past few days, for two reasons. I've recently moved into my grandmother's old house, and I purchased MLAR on an October afternoon 15 years ago with my father before visiting my grandparents. The second reason is that my beard is itching like crazy. This reason is relevant because sometime between the 1989 release of his album "Spike", which at the time was his biggest US hit ever, and 1991 when MLAR was released, Elvis grew probably the grossest beard of all time. He had a habit of following up big commercial success with something really offputting: for example, after his huge song Oliver's Army made the album "Armed Forces" a sales juggernaut, he got drunk in a bar, made racist comments about Ray Charles, and then got beat up by a girl. That he was able to claw his way back from that, primarily on the back of his single Veronica is astonishing. And then he grew the beard:

Anyway, this is the album he made. I have a deep affection for it, although it tends to be one of his more maligned albums. It has a nasty streak, but if EC's beard was half as itchy as mine is, I understand.

"The Other Side of Summer"-My favorite part of this song is that it has a verse dedicated to talking about how stupid "Imagine" by John Lennon is. I thought I was the only one who felt this way. My other favorite part is that it has, and I checked the liner notes, three different bass parts. Everything on this album is so thick sounding, the musical equivalent of split pea soup. And nothing says split pea soup like three different bass players. (The liner notes by EC also revealed that most of this song was cut live, meaning that all three bass players were playing at the same time. This is many people's versions of hell~ especially anybody who lives below someone listening to this song on a stereo system with a subwoofer.)

"Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)"- Do you need anymore evidence of the beard's misanthropic effects than the title of this song? Any song that wishes for nuclear annihilation that isn't written by Randy Newman is bound to be pretty severe. This song only features one bass player, the great Nick Lowe, which suggests to me that all the rest were killed by radiation from the nuclear fallout.

"How to Be Dumb"- This song only features one bass player, too, but it's written about a bass player, so that counts, right? This song is allegedly (like OJ killed his wife allegedly) about former Attractions bass player Bruce Thomas, who wrote a book about life on the road with EC. This might be the most vituperative song ever written. And if you don't know what vituperative means, Elvis is going to write a song about you, too. All that having been said, this is the most "classic" EC song on the record, and if he didn't call Bruce Thomas "the funniest f**ker in the world" very clearly enunciated, it might've been the single. At one point my senior year, I considered using the song's last lyrics as my yearbook quote: "Scratch your own head, stupid, count up to three, roll over on your back, repeat after me: don't you know how to be dumb?" Luckily wiser heads prevailed.

"All Grown Up"- I question the appropriateness of a man who just wrote a song called 'How to Be Dumb' writing a song about being all grown up. This is the song where Elvis first works with a string section. Perhaps coincidentally, this is also the song where many people stopped liking Elvis Costello.

"Invasion Hit Parade"- Damn that beard must be itching him like hell. Because this song makes him sound miserable. It features only one bass player, but it does feature two Elvises, as he credits himself twice, once as "DPA MacManus" (his given name) and as "E.C." Although in fairness, I surmise that the reason he uses his surname is because his father is credited with playing trumpet on the track. So maybe he just wanted to highlight his dad's involvement. Or maybe, since he credits himself as playing an instrument called "Radio Hail, Hail Freedonia Breakthrough" (which sounds like he's scatting into the blades of a small office fan) it's also possible every decision he made on this album was made just for perversity's sake.

"Harpies Bizarre"-On this song, there is only one bass, but it is hung upside down. I'm not kidding, the credits read "hung upside down Rickenbacker tremelo bass." So my question, given EC's penchant for verbally eviscerating bass players, is the bass player himself also hung upside down? This song also features a bassoon, meaning it is the favorite EC song of my friend Jess, who used to be a concert bassoonist, even though she's never heard it. Bassoonists are a loyal breed. Well, at least I assume so, since if they weren't, I'm sure Elvis would've written a song about it.

"After the Fall"- Elvis writes in the liner notes that this was the last album he recorded where he still thought in the two-sided vinyl format, meaning that he meant for this song to be the last song on side A. And since this song is probably the most depressing and tuneless song I've ever heard, my guess is that he didn't really want you to listen to the seven songs on side B. In all likelihood because you'd either hung yourself halfway through this song, or because you'd smashed the record into pieces.

"Georgie and Her Rival"-I've seen Elvis over a dozen times in concert, but I've never heard him play this song. I bet he's forgotten it even exists. But it's not terrible, and paying attention to the lyrics for the first time ever, it's a pretty clever little story song. Elvis even sounds like he used a ton of hair conditioner in his beard, because he doesn't sound like he wants to kill you musically.

"So Like Candy"- This song was co-written with Paul McCartney. From the Beatles (I know, I know, I bet you thought it was the guy from Wings.) Bass player count: two. I think it's the only song from this album that he still plays live, and it's pretty clear he likes it. There's a great line at the end about "Candy" taping a note to a record sleeve, which is one of those terrific images that seems so real. Things that seem less real? That anybody in the latter half of the 20th century is named Candy.

"Interlude: Couldn't Call it Unexpected No.2"- Who called for an interlude? Even if it did feature the Dirty Dozen Brass Band? And what kind of guy calls in the Dirty Dozen Brass band and has them play for 21 seconds? Same guy who thought this was a good look:

"Playboy to a Man"- Also co-written by Paul McCartney, except this time it's the guy from Wings. According to the liner notes, Elvis sang this song through a long rusty lead pipe. There's no joke that goes along with that. I just wonder who went to the junkyard to fetch the long rusty lead pipe? I will bet all the money in my pockets versus all the money in your pockets it was the bass player.

"Sweet Pear"- Where is Elvis meeting all these girls with the weird names?

"Broken"- This song was written by Elvis's then wife, Cait O'Riordan. When I was a teenager, I used to imagine getting married to somebody with as Irish a sounding name as Cait O'Riordan, but I would skip the part where she wrote songs that I recorded on my albums. I also skipped the part where she was a 14-year old boy, because that is who these lyrics sound like they were written by.

"Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4"- Don't bother looking for number 3. It's like that prank where kids release 3 goats into a school and paint 1, 2, and 4 on the sides so that everybody's looking for "goat number 3" all day. The final lines of this song were also contenders for yearbook quotes: "I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again." There's a truth bomb, right there. He sounds almost happy on this song. Know why? No bass player. Just a tuba. And how many bands do you think would be improved by replacing their bassists with tuba players? If you answered all of them, you would be correct. I've seen Elvis sing this song several times, and each time he shuts off his mike and sings out into the hall un-amplified. It's a show-boaty thing to do, no doubt, but he's smiling when he does it, as if to say "Holy shit was that beard itchy."

AMPERSAND

2009-10-26T09:23:00.000-04:00

Me rocking out circa 1997. Jesse is in white behind me, and Darrell's in blue.

In 2000, I acquired a Tascam 4-Track recorder. In the past I had used the condenser mics on tape decks and karaoke machine to record my songs, and I believed that by having access to the same recording technology that the Beatles used to make "Sgt. Pepper's", I would be able to record a masterpiece.

This is what I came up with.

Most of this was recorded in the room above Darrell's parents' garage, although a few tracks were recorded in my dad's sunroom, and two more in my dad's basement. Somewhere among my possessions is the mock liner notes I had prepped for this CD, where I think I came up with a name for each recording space. So I think Darrell's house was called "Helen's Way Studio" because he lived on Helen's Way, and I called my dad's sunroom "Sunroom Studio" which at least sounds like a real studio name. Which is beside the point: I was kind of a douche.

(Click on each title to listen to the song.)
"Sulky Skirt" The song had its origin after I went to see Elliott Smith play at the Axis, which most nights operated as a dance club. There were two girls there who looked like they had come for club night, but decided to stay for the concert. They looked miserable, which isn't surprising if you're expecting to make-out with a random guy while grinding him to the beat of the extended mix of "Believe" by Cher, but instead are listening to a musician who would later kill himself by stabbing himself in the heart.

"Shade" (version 2) I did mention this was intended to be an album of love songs, right? This song might be the best example of this, except that, in an attempt to obscure any personal details, the lyrics in the verses were intentionally obscured. So if you are wondering what's going on, only I and maybe half another person know. So don't worry about it. We first recorded this song in an up-tempo version (dubbed version #1) and then later re-recorded it with my dear friend Heather on harmony vocals. I came up with the idea of adding electric piano AFTER we recorded everything else, which means that it's slightly out of tune.

"Aztec Girl"- Alright so three songs in to my great album of love songs, and I'm batting 0.333. This song is a spiritual cousin to Shade, in that it's based on a true event-the same that Shade was based on-but from a different person's perspective. This song has some of the worst puns I've ever written, and for those who have followed my writing career for a while, you know THAT IS SAYING SOMETHING.

"Safe"-This is the oldest song here. I wrote this in the fall of 1998, for a girl who really needed to be kept safe from me. I think I really wanted to go for an Elliott Smith vibe on this song, especially with the double-tracked vocals. These are some of my favorite lyrics ever, even though they do include the word 'fart.'

"Thumbelina"- I wrote this one about a girl I worked with. I suspected that she might have a crush on me, and the fact that she was 17 and I was 20 freaked me out enough that I wrote this song about an older man and a much younger woman, which is how 17-year old girls look like to 20-year old guys. This might be Darrell's favorite song of mine.

"Rainy Day"- This was intended to be a concept album, but really maybe only five of the ten songs fit. This is one of them. The lyrics obscure a real event, featuring the same cast of characters from "Shade" and "Aztec Girl" and while this song is way way too long, I like the accordion playing, and there is profundity in the refrain "Why don't you save your rain for rainy day?" that I think I might have missed way back then.

"A Little Island South of Nebraska"-This was inspired by a dream I had about a bunch of different girls I knew. I wrote about half of the song before I realized that the first line of each verse just so happened to spell out the same word. I then added a few more lines that also spelled out that same word. I think you can tell, if you read the lyrics closely, which ones are accidental and which ones are purposeful, because the accidental ones are way better. I remember adding a bass part to this song, but it must be way down in the mix, because I don't know how to mix things.

"Oubliette"- An oubliette is a medieval prison cell that only opened from above, and had round, smooth walls. So basically, once someone was dropped in, they could never get out. This song is also about a girl.

"Fred Astaire"- This song has a really beautiful melody, and pretty terrible lyrics. It also has some terrible singing. I was referencing a movie called "Funny Face" that I had never seen. My roommate owned the video, and she once suggested we watch it, but I always had something else to do. Like write songs about movies I had never seen. So I apologize to any Audrey Hepburn/Fred Astaire fans who think I've bastardized their favorite film. The "percussion" mentioned in this song is me slapping my car keys against my palm. We were like the MacGyvers of pop music.

"Zero One"-This song was the impetus for me to record an "album" because I thought the conceit in the chorus (I am the zero and you are the one) was so good, and that 2001 would be the perfect year to release that song. I think it might have been inspired by those "why-was-six-afraid-of-seven?" jokes. And I'm pretty serious. So, while this song was recorded in 2001, along with nine other songs, and we actually burned up dozens of CDs (with artwork printed on them) this "album" had pretty poor circulation. Until 2009. And while in my current relationship, it is true that if I am the zero then my fiancee is the nine, "Zero Nine" doesn't have the same ring to it. C'est la vie. Anyway, apologies for the digital distortion at the end; it's what I get for keeping my CDs loose in boxes when I move.

I hope you've enjoyed this embarrassing look into my past. It continues on tresselsound where I am now posting tracks from my 2002 CD "Songs About Girls" which I recorded live in my Dad's office two days before I left for a road trip to Virginia. Spoiler alert: I sold enough copies to put gas in my car.

Bang A Gong: The Music of RJT

2009-10-13T12:02:00.000-04:00

I wrote my first solo song called "She's Alive" in 1994. I wrote it on a Thursday, taught it to my friends Darrell and Brad that Saturday, and then performed it the following Tuesday night in front of 700 people at our summer camp talent show. It was the largest crowd I have ever played for. Eight years later I finished up a summer residency at a local coffee shop performing a song about how Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler look alike to about 17 people. So just like the Beatles, I moved into the studio, recording songs at a pace that alternated between ferocious and moribund, and I've decided to preserve the whole catalog, the "Ryan Tressel" box set if you will, on the internet in all its glory. I'm going to start with the first recordings I did in 2001 when I traded my friend Stephanie an acoustic guitar and $75 for her Tascam 4-track recorder. The first songs that I recorded with my friend Darrell where collected onto a CD entitled "Ampersand", the opening track of which SULKY SKIRT can be listened to here .

The song had its origin after I went to see Elliott Smith play at the Axis, which most nights operated as a dance club. There were two girls there who looked like they had come for club night, but decided to stay for the concert. They looked miserable, which isn't surprising if you're expecting to make-out with a random guy while grinding him to the beat of the extended mix of "Believe" by Cher, but instead are listening to a musician who would later kill himself by stabbing himself in the heart.

Sulky Skirt, written by Ryan J. Tressel, recorded and performed by RJT and D.Morey.

LISTENING PARTY: Roll the Bones

2009-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Continuing with the theme of albums that made a tremendous mark on me in the fall of 1992 (my memories can now get into R-rated movies without a parent), I present perhaps the most potentially embarrassing fall fave, Rush's "Roll the Bones".

"Dreamline"- What would a roadmap to Jupiter entail? Are there a lot of landmarks between here and Jupiter? One line into this Rush album we've already hit our first stumbling block. Rush's lyrics, written by drummer Neil Peart, are actually all cribbed from the "Dune" novel series. The second verse begins with "Time is a gypsy caravan" which isn't the worst metaphor in the world, but then Geddy Lee says that he is as lonely as an eagle's cry, which is also not the worst metaphor in the world, because it is in fact the worst SIMILE in the world, being a comparison using 'like' or 'as'. Lots of seventies progressive rock bands make you think about complex math while you listen, but Rush makes you think about grammar.

"Bravado"- I imagine that my dad bought this album from the BMG music club, where you could get 12 CDs for a penny. That means that this album is only has to provide me with more than 1/12 of one cent's worth of entertainment to be worthwhile. Listening to the song "Bravado" puts that possibility in dire straits. Also, this is the second song in a row whose title appears nowhere within the lyrics themselves. It's lucky for Rush that neither of these songs became big hits, because then they'd have to do that thing where some many people think your song is called one thing that you have to reprint the album artwork with the song's title in parenthesis AFTER the mistaken title. See Green Day's "The Time of Your Life (Good Riddance)" or the Fray's "Over My Head (Cable Cars)" I appreciate your subtlety, Neal, if none of these plebs do. Still hate the song though.

"Roll the Bones"-If this song didn't exist, I don't think I would've ever listened to this album all the way through, let alone dozens of times. It is bitchin'. It starts out with kind of same lame early 90's style bass playing, but then increases in awesomeness exponentially with each passing second. Also this song is one of those songs that has a part you think is the chorus, but is in fact only the pre-chorus to an even cooler chorus, and even that is just a pre-chorus for the ultimate chorus of all time. Also, there is a rap solo in the bridge--actually two rap solos, and since nobody is credited in the liner notes, I'm going to assume it is one of the members of Rush with their voices digitally altered. Although, watching this live video, it appears I am wrong, and in fact the rapper is Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death. Which makes sense, because the only way that you can write a song this unbelievable awesome is that you make a blood sacrifice to ancient gods. My guess at who Rush sacrificed? Their original lyricist.

"Face Up"- The problem with putting the most awesome song ever recorded on your album is that any song that you put on following it sounds like crap. Luckily, Face Up would've sounded like crap no matter where you put it. This is very strategic on Rush's part. He keeps repeating that if he could only reach the dial inside of him he would turn it up, and then turn my wild card down. I have no idea what that means, except that it sounds kind of dirty. Much has been made of Geddy Lee's lead vocals, and I've heard them compared to Jiminey Cricket, but could you imagine how differently that story would've turned out if Pinnocchio had taken the advice offered by Geddy Lee in this song instead of "When You Wish Upon A Star"? Well, actually, didn't Pinnocchio ignore Jiminey's advice and go to that gay bathhouse, Pleasure Island? So maybe if Jiminey had told him to reach the dial inside and turn it up, Pinocchio would've just gone to school and studied hard instead.

"Where's My Thing?" God, you know what I need now? Some kind of rock/funk hybrid instrumental. Oh, if we could make it some kind of progressive rock, that would be awesome. Also, how many synthesizers do you have? Bring ALL OF THEM.

"The Big Wheel"- I had actually heard this song on WBCN before, which is probably why I pick up this album to listen to instead of the best of Poco. This song doesn't have a rap solo by a dancing death god, but that's the only reason "Roll the Bones" gets a leg up. I think this record was sequenced like it was going to be listened to on a two-sided format (vinyl or cassette) and this would've opened side B. It's pretty awesome, even if it does that synthesizer/guitar effect between each verse that Pink Floyd used on every song they ever wrote after Roger Waters quit the band. Who would win in a fight, Pink Floyd Vs. Rush? While PF does have a giant inflatable pig, remember that Rush has Mictlantecuhtli. This would be a great pay-for-view event, especially since the only people who even know what pay-for-view events even are are guys in their late 40s.

"Heresy"- Any big words I know that I didn't learn from Swamp Thing comics I picked up from song titles by progressive rock bands. I remember when Nine Inch Nails came out with a song called Heresy somebody I went to high school with pronounced it as "hear-say" (which is the legal term for when you tattle on somebody) instead of "hair-a-see" (which is when you say something that contradicts the bible, a.k.a. the truth) and I just scoffed. "Clearly, you've never heard 'Roll the Bones' by Rush," I sneered, right before he kicked the shit out of me.

"Ghost of a Chance"- This is not about ghosts, despite what the title might lead you to believe. It's actually a weird minotaur like creature, with verses from a "Living Color" tribute band and chorus by Michael Bolton. It's rare to see one of these in captivity. But if you can listen to this song, try and imagine it playing at a wedding in 1992 and people with really teased out hair slow dancing to the slow parts and then awkwardly having to do some kind of white person shuffle until it slows down again.

Or just watch this:

"Neurotica"- Around this time in my life, Madonna gave up any pretense that she wasn't a sex worker, and released her album and single "Erotica" in conjunction with her book that showed her performing oral sex on Vanilla Ice, which is the worst career decision you can ever make, topping the previous record held by Vanilla Ice for his performance in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze" (which topped the previous record, which was also held by Vanilla Ice for his entire career up to that point.) So, I wouldn't do anything so crass as suggest that you listen to this song imagining the middle-aged members of Rush in various states of undress in sexually explicit positions, but I also wouldn't judge you if you did.

"You Bet Your Life"-Not when Mictlantecuhtli is on your side, I don't.

"Jack? Relax. Get busy with the facts..."

LISTENING PARTY: Green

2009-10-05T09:54:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before the magical summer/fall of 1992, when fueled by teenage hormones I decided to listen to every record in my father's collection in an attempt to discover music. For a large part of my life prior to this, I had almost zero interest in popular music, except for an intense Weird Al period when I was in third grade and a short-lived and peer pressured interest in the rap group the Fat Boys. I suppose a really terrible graduate level thesis could be written about why certain albums spoke to me (Rush's "Roll the Bones") while others didn't (Supertramp's "Breakfast in America", but I'm not going to talk about those ones. I'm going to talk about the Chris Elliot show "Get A Life" and its soundtrack, "Green" by R.E.M.
"Get A Life" was a short-lived sitcom in which Chris Elliot played a 35-year paperboy who still lived with his parents.

(Did you catch the pedophile reference? Pretty edgy for 1991.)
Now "Green" by R.E.M. was in no way the soundtrack to "Get A Life", but the show did use the R.E.M. song "Stand" as its theme song. And here is my entrance way into the world of Mssrs. Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe.

"Pop Song 89"- This is one of those songs that never mentions its title in the lyrics at all. It's really less of a title than a description. Imagine how confusing bands' albums would be if they just described the song instead of naming it? How would you know which was your favorite Fray track if they were all just named "Mopey Song 07"? Or if Randy Newman albums just were listed "Ironically Racist Song" numbers 1-9? I could probably spend all day playing that game, but now the song is over. It was pretty good. Here, check it out yourself:

"Get Up"-I hope Michael Stipe isn't yelling at me to "Get Up" in some kind of political fashion, like "get up and end the invasion of Nicaragua" and is instead telling me to "get up off the couch and stop blogging about our albums and go eat one of those fancy cupcakes you have in your fridge" but I'm not sure. Oh, I thought of another one. Going to a jukebox and trying to decide if you want to hear "Song with Beautiful in the Title 2000" by U2 or "Song with Beautiful in the Title 2007" by U2.

"You Are the Everything"- That's nice of you to say, Michael. Unless you're making a comment about my weight, which wouldn't necessarily be uncalled for. Maybe I should get up more. But seriously, this is a really beautiful song. I'm pretty sure some one is playing a mandolin, presaging R.E.M.'s decision to record every song with a mandolin forever. Or just on "Losing My Religion" which I've heard so many times that it just seems like forever.

"Stand"- Sweet jesus is this song terrific. I love how anthemic it sounds, including the "straight-on-the-eighth-notes" piano hammering that happens during the chorus. Also, amazing? The wah-wah on the solo. What is more amazing than that? The lyrics, you say? I should agree. I read an interview with Michael Stipe once where he said that "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies was more culturally significant than anything by the Beatles. And if that's true (and I might not totally disagree) than that must make "Stand" by R.E.M. the most culturally significant thing since the Renaissance. I'm only half-joking. Here's a clip of Chris Elliot riding a bike to watch while you think about it.

"World Leader Pretend"- I remember being 13 and struggling to understand the grammar of this title. Shouldn't it be world leader pretends? And then what is he pretending? Or she, although in 1988 I think the only female world leader was Imelda Marcos, and I don't think this song is about her, because the lyrics do not mention shoes once. So you do the math.

"The Wrong Child"- I'll just take a minute to express how impressed I am with R.E.M. "Green" was their major label debut for Warner Brothers after making five records with independent label I.R.S. and it's so weird. There are probably lots of songs you think came from this album that didn't. "The One I Love"? "It's the End of the World as We Know It And I Feel Fine"? Both from the album before. They get signed to a multi-million dollar major label record label,and you can picture the A&R guy rubbing his hands together thinking about all the hit singles R.E.M. are going to produce and they make this weird, weird record. It's beautiful and haunting, like the song "The Wrong Child" which sounds like Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, but man it's still pretty weird. The weirdest thing? The album is called "Green" but the album cover is totally orange. Did I just blow your mind? I think I did.

"Orange Crush"- This is probably the kind of song that Warners thought R.E.M. would be recording, and I like to imagine that they wrote 11 songs like this one, and then recorded a bunch of weirder songs, releasing those, but including this one, just so people knew that they could. I don't really know what this song is about, although I remember thinking that it was about Vietnam, probably because I had also just watched Apocalypse Now, and while I don't think they mention the defoliant "Agent Orange" by name in it, I made the connection none the less. Listening to it now, I can also hear helicopters in the background where you would imagine a guitar solo or something, which adds to the 'Nam effect. I would someday like to front a good rock'n'roll band, and I will have the drummer start each song with the rapid fire snare hits that Bill Berry uses throughout this song, no matter how poorly it fits with the song we're playing, or how sick the drummer or our audience gets of it. That's how rad it is.

"Turn You Inside Out"-I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a good thing to say to another person. I wonder if this is how Michael Stipe picks up guys or ladies at the bar? I don't know what I would do if somebody approached me and told me they would turn me inside out, although I might point out that it's probably pretty gross in there. I mean, the digestive system alone! Leave that stuff on the inside. Couldn't you just turn me upside down? Although that might succeed in making me turn myself inside out. How about you just buy me a drink and then tell me you like my smile?

"Hairshirt"- I have a hair shirt, if by hair-shirt you mean a hairy chest.

The first line of this song is "I am not the kind of dog who could keep you waiting for no good reason." Do dogs ever have good reasons for keeping people waiting? Isn't it usually "There was another dog butt over there" or "I'm a dog and I don't understand what you're saying, so I'm just going to keep standing here for a few more minutes until I get bored"? More mandolin, by the way. How did nobody not notice this before? People always talk about R.E.M.'s follow-up record "Out of Time" as being the one with all the mandolins, but they probably were thinking of this one. Man, it's hard to keep R.E.M. records straight. Imagine how much more difficult it would be if all the songs were just described instead of titled? Oh, wait, I already did this joke. Did I already mention that the album is called "Green" but the album cover is orange? I did. Man, it's a good thing the next song is the last song.

"I Remember California"- Which is a funny title, because have you ever tried to name all the U.S. states from memory? Because nobody ever forgets California. Or Texas. Or Florida. The weirdly shaped ones. You're more likely to forget Oklahoma. Or Missouri. Have you noticed how little I've talked about this record itself? It's because it's pretty good, although it would probably rank near the bottom of my favorite R.E.M. albums. But I really like R.E.M., much to the chagrin of my poor fiancee, so even one of their least-liked albums is still pretty good. But I'm glad this is the last song, because I've run out of funny and/or interesting things to say about this album.

Curses! An untitled, unlisted track! I know I've written about this before, but who was the first artist to include an hidden bonus track on a CD because I'd like to kick them in the face. I hate putting a CD into my itunes and it has like 47 tracks of silence before the bonus track which itself only starts after 3 minutes of tape hiss. Or when the last track on the CD is 35 minutes long because it has the really awesome last song from the album, twenty-two minutes of silence, and then a kind of lame jam type song. Sorry, I didn't realize I had all that anger in me. Although I will admit this hidden R.E.M. song is a separate track and there isn't a ridiculously long silence before it starts, and it's actually a pretty fun and cool little song, so I'll just pretend that the track information from song number 11 just fell off the back of the CD case. Which is orange, if I haven't already mentioned it.

Sad Girls

2009-09-04T12:39:00.000-04:00

Sad Girls written & performed by Ryan J. Tressel

Sad girls move through the subway, get on the right trains. They're going home. But they don't look like they're so sure, maybe head instead to the airport. But they've never flown. They touch buttons on blouses as scumbags and louses meet all their softness with shove. Sad girls, oppressed by love. Sad girls listen on headphones to crooners like Tom Jones quietly moving their lips. They entertain such fancies like throwing their panties but they stay snug on their hips. They practice their curtsy with thoughts filthy and dirty the whore with the governess's gloves. Sad girls, oppressed by love. Home to their boyfriends, that's where the day ends, but they've got a DVR. I have made girls sad. I didn't mean to. I never do, but I've seen their face as I've robbed them of their joy, equal parts cold and coy, baleful and base. This world breaks all hearts and should tear us apart, but I still love them so. Besides, sadness is all that we know.

Splinter

2009-09-03T12:27:00.001-04:00

Splinter written and performed by Ryan J. Tressel
The salt on your skin clung with a fervor that I did not possess. You said you'd grant me any three wishes, if only I could guess the shade of your eyes and the height of your tanline the way that your waves crash and crest against mine. Our kisses like brine. You seemed like the shore, defined by something else. You drew a line in the sand between everything and yourself and you sank like a dream in the flotsam and steam and you said we were one but I could see the seams. A roof without a center beam. Please don't remember me. You thought we would last but then came the winter. The man who loves you rests inside me, nagging like a splinter. It's too deep to handle like the wick of the candle that's buried in the wax. It's impervious to flame and won't respond to its name we're all turning our backs on them but not you but there's nothing to do the way you're both attached. So you can't control me and you can't convince me that I don't deserve less than nothing at all except the rise and the fall of the sun and the shame please don't mention my name, not even silently. Just don't remember me.

A Rake's Progress

2009-09-02T10:25:00.000-04:00

from the painting series 'A Rake's Progress' by William Hogarth
A Rake's Progress written and performed by Ryan J. Tressel

You’re only there when I fuck up. When I left my life a mess. You only catch the worst snapshots of me, like this was a Rake’s Progress. You only see me when I’m on my knees. It looks like prayer to you. I’m not asking for nothing I’m just weak—standing is more than I can do. Where were you when the sun shone through? When oceans turned mountains to sand? Where’d you go when I tried to grow into a man you could stand. Nobody noticed the bridge had fallen. The river just swallowed the brick. I loved you as much as the water could handle. I loved you until I was sick. The rain started Monday now it’s the day after never. I’m Noah submerged in the flood. I didn’t mean to let the whole dam fail. I thought hope would keep us dry enough. Where’s that fella with my umbrella? I’d give that bastard a hand. And you went missing after we were kissing back when I was a man you could stand. But you’re only there when I fuck up. You might as well be here all the time. It’s love we need to keep us freed. It’s love that keeps our hands tied. So I promise you nothing so you can expect it, nurture it like a child. And I’ll call the doctor say increase my morphine. I’ll pretend it’s your number I dialed. And I’ll find you at my waterloo. You’ll bleach my coat when I die. I’ll let paint dry and then I’ll watch you try.

Clara Road

2009-08-31T10:53:00.000-04:00

Clara Road written and performed by Ryan J. Tressel
This town is so small they let fathers name streets after their daughters. Dead end cul de sacs a mile long; I wonder why they bother. But there's no avenue named for me, this night is all I get. The dashboard clock, your hungry hands, my father's silhouette. So drive me down the end of Clara Rd. though that's not my name, but in the dark and on our backs I'm sure we all feel the same. The stories always speak of this as something precious lost but it's just the burn of cheap upholstery, the night as black as your exhaust. There's something about the tangled hair, the blouses streaked with green and the quiet, childlike shudder as you cum against your jeans. You catch your breath with heavy head crushed against my chest. We've lain so long the grass has left criss-crosses burned into our flesh. So drive me home the way we came, I live on Laurel Ave. My father restless, mourning the loss of something girls never really have. And go wash your stained and stickiness, think it neither crime nor victory. Just make your lust into a thing and name it after me.

The Tailor's Doubt

2009-08-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

The Tailor's Doubt written and performed by Ryan J. Tressel

The first time we prick ourselves, we never trust our hands again. Our thumb is like an errant lover who won’t say where he’s been. But we carry on, we pray that all our stitching holds out although even the best seams unravel at the tugging of a doubt. We push needle through cloth, pull thread ‘til it gives and this is the way we live. Things aren’t made to last forever; permanence is just a ruse a lie that is a comfort; two things we often confuse. Time is a villain, for certain. It eats away at us like a moth We don’t feel we can protect these things; so we never take them off. But still the damage is done, the tears and holes still show and this is the life we know. We’re damned by contentment, a word when misspelled is contempt. We were just following a pattern, we sewed like we knew what it meant. But still we are uncertain, we can’t believe it won’t hurt. So we stand at our stations, we hang as limp as sleeves on a shirt. But still doubt takes flight, it’s caught in our hearts like a wren, and we’ll never trust nothing again.

Call Me Early

2009-08-28T12:57:00.001-04:00

Another track from Sick Building, Call Me Early. It was written and recorded on August 13th, 2009.

All of a sudden my name it sounds so different. Like it’s not your voice your lips or your tongue There is breath that pushes your voice towards me it’s foreign but still fills my lungs. All of a sudden the dawn is upon us. The night bows out in silent curtsy. Say my name a thousand times, just call me early. We are developed like Polaroids that fuzzily grow into view. We shake our frames to make it move faster, shaking like my hands touching you. We are not looking for any contrast, just trying to capture certainty that moves and changes while we’re waiting, so call me early. All of a sudden the planets shifted we sat while we hurtled through space. We dreamed two dreams in x-ray vision as if it were all one time, one place. All of a sudden the light seems so different, it makes our shadows looks tall while we’re on our knees. We’re just saying prayers to one another, so call me early. Our gods are just the distances between us, so call me early, love.

Marx Brothers

2009-08-26T16:05:00.000-04:00

"I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member."
-Groucho Marx

Marx Brothers written and performed by RJT

I started a joke. The end I couldn’t remember. I said August doesn’t seem to know when to quit. You told me it was September. You said don’t be embarrassed. Who can remember the rhyme about the rest having 31? And besides it’s the time of year when you can’t tell the hour by the position of the sun. I called my boy the other day. Nobody was home. They start them back at school so early these days. I couldn’t put down the phone. His mom is doing a hell of a job. Our boy is so polite. I only get to listen to the voicemails he leaves in the middle of the night. I could kiss you forever and hold you so tightly like a frame holds a door. I would promise you everything. And I would mean it. But I’ve said that shit before. So I’ll wave goodbye. I’ll tip you my hat. You can watch me walk down your street like I was the man you think I am. Damn, that would be sweet.

Where I've Been

2009-08-25T16:23:00.000-04:00

Apologies for being absent for the past two weeks. I've been working on finishing up this summer's collection of song (often called an album) I've put two songs from the new collection, "Sick Building", as well as the lyrics on my music site, Tresselsound. I've added two of the thirteen tracks, so check it out every few days for new tracks. Thanks. To reward your patience, here is a picture of Gary Busey from "The Buddy Holly Story." Enjoy!

I GOT TRON

2009-08-13T19:40:00.001-04:00

This is a true story. I was kind of a little shit.

Click on picture for larger image

LISTENING PARTY: Zooropa

2009-08-06T14:16:00.001-04:00

I spent two summers during my teenage years at a summer study program at Bridgewater State College called PCC; I subsequently have spent seven summers and counting there as an adult, working first as a residential counselor and for the past several years as a master teacher. It's a difficult experience to put into words; needless to say, putting five hundred teenage boys and girls in a dormitory for six weeks, limiting their sleep, and ginning up their hormones is a recipe for a disaster, and kids usually leave the program in some kind of stupefied funk: nothing will ever be as good as those six weeks were, ever, never ever. The program closes tomorrow, and while as a thirty year old, I am slightly bemused by the melodrama my students are going through (and writing about!) I am also sympathetic. I remember leaving PCC as a student. I was thoroughly depressed. Luckily I had U2's Zooropa album to comfort me.

"Zooropa"- Released in August of 1993, Zooropa was intended to be an EP recorded during U2's ZooTV tour in support of their monstrously successful Achtung Baby record. As with everything U2 does, excessiveness took control, and the EP exploded into a full fledged studio album. It opens with the title track which certainly bears the influence of their producer Brian Eno with its almost robotic bass line, strange voices, and every instrument compressed until they sound like they come from outerspace. Seriously, Eno is so good at compressing stuff, he hires his production skills out at vineyards to work the grape presses. I have no idea what this song is about, or what a zooropa is, but if you listen to this song you will feel like you live in a dark abandoned tunnel. Which as a 14-year old boy, I certainly did, emotionally at least.

"Babyface"- I'm not sure if this is about Kenneth Edmonds or not. It does have a cool toy piano part in it, though, so if you are the father of a small child, you can play this and pretend it is a children's song, but only if your child is a German nihilist. Brian Eno helps the Edge make his guitar sound like rayguns. So it's like a battle between Raffi and Space Invaders.

"Numb"-Now The Edge's guitar sounds like something you would use to open a can of beets. This song is probably one of the few I can think of where the song was enhanced by the video. The Edge's vocals sound eerily disinterested, which makes them great. But it's something Bono couldn't pull off. He'd get two lines in, start thinking about children in Istanbul and the emoting would start. That's probably why U2 has been so successful, because it is a band comprised of a singer who looks like he cares way too much all the time, surrounded by one guy who looks like he doesn't care because he's trying too hard to look unbreakably cool (Larry) another who looks like he doesn't care because he's too busy trying to make his guitar sound like someone raping a sealion (the Edge) and another guy who looks like he doesn't care because, well, maybe he doesn't (Adam).

"Lemon"-This is the first song that sounds like it might have been fun, although Eno came by and compressed all the fun right out of it. Bono sings the whole number in his crazy falsetto. Edge and Eno sing background vocals about light being projected and capturing color, and all sorts of other weird things that sound like they were left over from Talking Head's Remain in Light album. While this album doesn't have the afro-poly rhythms of that TH record, one thing it does share is the sense that you're getting dirty listening to it. Not because it is overly sexualized, but in the same way that you get dirty when you bury yourself up to your neck in your parents' garden. Because that's what listening to this album feels like. The backing vocals end the song by repeating that midnight is where the day begins, which is true, although I don't know if I want my days starting out with infomercials about "Girls Gone Wild" which they start playing at midnight every night.

"Stay, Faraway So Close!"- This is the classic ballad from the record, and while it's also the least "processed" song on the record, it's kind of dirty by being surrounded by all the other songs on the record. It's also the only song that has that trademark U2-lift in the chorus, which might have briefly lifted me from the darkness of my father's basement where I spent most of the month of August '93. But the song is still pretty dark. Case in point: it's a love song named after a Wim Wenders movie. That's like basing the interior decorating of your kitchen on a Francis Bacon painting.

"Daddy's Going to Pay For Your Crashed Car"-The drums have been processed so that they sound like somebody's playing your vinyl siding with PVC pipes. This is the beginning of U2's interest in electronic music, and I'd guess this album did better in Europe than it did here. When I worked at a used record store, we had so many copies of Zooropa that we stacked them up and made a patio out of them. That's not to say that it's a bad album. Far from it. But used record stores (those that still exist) are loading to maximum capacity with copies of the difficult album a band released after its multi-platinum smash hit. If Newbury Comics had a nickel for every copy of Guns N' Roses "The Spaghetti Incident?" they had, well then that probably means they'd have sold out of Guns N' Roses "The Spaghetti Incident?" because I think they sell them for a nickel. So they'd have a shitload of nickels, is the point.

"Some Days Are Better Than Others"- I can decide if Bono was being oblivious with the title of this song, or beautifully zen. It's kind like a koan, right? Or one of those things wealthy rock stars sing about when they try and think about the common man. Because it is my firm belief that every day being Bono is an equally awesome day.

"The First Time"- This album actually came with a warning label. "Caution: Before allowing any emotionally wound up teenagers listen to 'The First Time', please make sure to remove all sharp and blunt objects from their bedrooms." You know how their 1988 song "All I Want Is You" starts out slowly, with a faraway and dark sounding guitar, with all the other instruments kind of growling and bubbling under the surface until the song opens up triumphantly? Picture that song minus the triumphant opening. This song is dark. Like so dark that no light can escape it. I mean, lyrically, it's relatively positive "for the first time I feel love" but dear god, making a 14-year old boy who just had his heart crushed for the first time at summer camp listen to it is torture, even according to John Yoo.

"Dirty Day"- Darrell pointed out to me years ago that the brilliance of U2 is that they play to their strengths, that they developed musically before any of them really knew what they were doing, so that when the Edge started using his guitar as more of a sonic paintbrush, the job of holding down a lot of the melodic and harmonic work fell to the bass player (think "With or Without You".) So listen to any bass line from any U2 song and you'll be able to tell what song it is. This song has a pretty great bass line, is what I'm saying. The end of the song picks up in intensity, and the guitar part is reminiscent of some of the more rocking tunes from Achtung Baby, so that's cool. As far as the rest of the song? Well, I still wouldn't be leaving that depressed kid alone if I were you.

"The Wanderer"- Signs that you have made a difficult follow-up record to a smash hit: 1)Severely obtuse production. 2)Severely obtuse cover art, usually not featuring any band members photos. 3) Severely obtuse song titles that sound like you've been watching too many German or Swedish films, or that you've been spending too much time with spoiled dilettantes and 4) Severely obtuse guest vocals. U2 do their part by having Johnny Cash sing lead vocals over the final track. It is probably the only instance of the Man in Black singing over what sounds like 1980s Europop. I don't know why I even bothered saying probably. This was well before Johnny Cash had gained his "hipster cred" and was known mostly at the time as the "Ugly One" in the Highwaymen, (and that was saying something.) But honestly, if you'd just sold 10 gajillion records, what would you do? Record a similar sounding follow-up? Or record a series of duets with KITT the car from Knight Rider? I don't think I need to tell you where I stand. This is a pretty good song, and I wonder if there is a version of this song recorded in a more traditional guitars/bass/drum fashion somewhere in a vault. The same vault where my heart has been locked away for all time. Whoops, that was 14-year Ryan talking.

I GOT MORRISSEY

2009-07-28T14:56:00.000-04:00

Click on picture for larger image

LISTENING PARTY: Dance Naked

2009-07-22T15:49:00.001-04:00

John Mellencamp can't get no respect. He's seriously like the Rodney Dangerfield of rock and roll. Part of it his own fault: a lot of his stuff is pretty terrible. And nobody will ever forget his decision to spend much of the 80s wearing either a vest with no shirt or his grandmother's eyeglasses. And yes, who the hell wants to live in a pink houses? But he's released a number of really pretty excellent albums that are considered, thoughtful and soulful (Big Daddy, Human Wheels, Mr. Happy Go Lucky).

I'm not going to talk about any of those albums today. I'm going to talk about Dance Naked.

"Dance Naked"- I don't think rock lyric writing gets more zen then the opening couplet of this song. "I want you to dance naked/so I can see you." It's really a simple request, really. I know that it sounds pretty misogynistic, or sexist, or really just kind of creepy, but John does tell you near the end that you can dance naked "but only if you want to." There are a great many pick-up lines that I have heard that I cannot imagine ever working, but having a rock singer from Indiana who not only has cauliflower ears but a cauliflower face say to you "I want you to dance naked, but only if you want to"? I can actually see that working.

"Brothers"-I've never had a brother, and I don't think I would like to have one. John Mellencamp's tale of two brothers who wreck each other cars, get each other beat up, and don't approve of anything the other one does, well, it isn't doing too much to make me rethink my position. Especially, because with my luck, my brother would become a high-selling but critical ignored or underestimated singer-songwriter who would write songs about how much he can't stand me. Luckily I have sisters who are far more attractive and successful than me, with doctorates in biomedical engineering. I dodged a bullet there.

"When Margaret Comes to Town"- I love songs with girls' names in them. Especially when the name in the title is part of a statement, or a question, or just a dependent clause. "When Margaret Comes to Town." "Meet Virginia." "Amy Hit the Atmosphere." "Debbie Does Dallas." I can't remember who that last one is by. This song has a pretty cool little breakdown section right before the guitar solo. T

This album's history, from what I can remember from an issue of Entertainment Weekly I read 15 years ago, was that after the commercially disappointing "Human Wheels" album, Mellencamp decided to record an album really quickly (like two weeks-quickly, although that seems like a long time to me) and a side effect of this is that only three of the songs have a bass guitar on them! So it's two guitars and drums and that's it. Where was his bass player? On vacation? How badly did John Mellencamp want this album done? Bass player: 'I'll be fishing until the 12th, but I'm available after that.' Mellencamp: 'Screw you. I'm getting this album done in 3 hours or I'm not doing it.'

"Wild Night"-This is the one you know, the cover of the Van Morrison song that you probably don't know. It's also the first one to feature a bass guitar, played by the then unknown Me'Shell Ndegeocello, who sings duet. This is the only song that songs really fleshed out and produced, which might have something to do with the fact that somebody else wrote it in 1971. That would be like dressing a 24-year old up as a baby and talking about how well behaved it is. Clearly cheating.

"L.U.V."- I started writing songs by myself the summer this album came out, and I used this song as the template for most of them. To whit: verses filled with nonsense rhymes semi-rapped like Dylan in Subterranean Homesick Blues, with a rather catchy chorus. There's a great moment, however, right after the solo section where Mellencamp sings a capella "Wait a minute, let me check my tan/ Am I the same color as Superman?" My guess is probably, since Superman grew up in Kansas, which is right near Indiana. You guys were practically neighbors. Also, because of his Kryptonian ability to absorb the yellow sun, I'm going to guess he can't tan.

"Another Sunny Day"- This is the ballad on the record. I think it's about the environment. Actually, the more I listen to it, it seems like John's complaining about people complaining about the state of the environment. I always thought he was a bit more progressive, because, frankly Mr. Cougar Mellencamp, even back in 1994 the planet was going to hell. I wonder if he still sings this song after watching "An Inconvenient Truth"? Probably not, as it's kind of sucky no matter what the lyrics say. Listen, Mr. Mellencamp, I know that you're going to die soon, but I'm hopefully not going to, so I might have to worry about where I live being underwater when I'm older. I'm sorry if that's bumming you out. But it wasn't like "Rain on the Scarecrow" was exactly a real upbeat number.

"Too Much to Think About"- We're back to rocking out, without the bass again, and I think this is the album that made me really appreciate what a good bass player could bring to a song. Or even a really terrible bass player. Namely: bass.

This title of this song may refer to any number of different things. One thing it certainly does not refer to? This album.

"The Big Jack"- I've been ragging on this album and it certainly deserves a lot of it, but frankly, I own it and know it well because when I was 15, I kind of liked it. Hell, I still kind of like it, in the same way that I like Count Chocula--I like it but at least now I'm aware that it's not any good. And I like it anyway. One thing that makes the album really likable? It is about 30 minutes long. I think kids today would feel ripped off, especially since CDs can hold more than twice that, but for me, there's something comforting about putting this CD on and knowing that it will be over faster than an episode of "Herman's Head."

"The Break-Out"- This album is what used to be called an EP, which was like a single but longer. EP stood for Extended Play, and full-length albums used by called long players, as though long and extended were different measurements on the same scale. Like there's hot and cold? This is like hot and warmer. Warmer than what? Hot? Cold? Isn't extended relative to what it's been extended from?

In case you haven't figured it out, "The Break-Out" has nothing discernible interesting going on in it. It's a pretty standard plate rock song, the kind you'd throw on the end of the EP you were recording in two weeks while your bass player is on vacation as a stop-gap measure between two excellent critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing albums. This disc probably sold more than all of his really great albums combined, which is too bad, because if this were my first exposure to John Mellencamp, I'd spend the whole album messing with the EQ on my stereo trying to figure out why every song was so trebly and then Me'Shell Ndegeocello would start playing the bass line to "Wild Night" and blow out my speakers and I'd throw this album in the trash.

I GOT HAIR

2009-07-19T17:58:00.000-04:00

(click to enlarge picture)

I GOT SICK

2009-07-14T18:20:00.000-04:00

Click on each image to enlarge

I GOT FAT

2009-07-09T19:37:00.000-04:00

Here is my first attempt at an autobiographical comic strip: I GOT FAT

Click on each image to read a larger version of the strip.

LISTENING PARTY: Voodoo Lounge

2009-07-09T13:53:00.000-04:00

I'm doomed, doomed I say, to associate certain albums with certain periods of my life, to the point that I listen to albums that I know instinctively that I should no longer enjoy. Each summer for the past six years, I've been working/teaching at the summer program I attended when I was 14, and when I bought the Rolling Stones "Voodoo Lounge" album. And so every summer, when the program rolls around, I find myself digging out this album and listening to it, instead of say, "Exile on Main Street" or "Sticky Fingers" or even something by Mozart. I can't help it, you see. It's out of my control.

Maybe surprisingly to people, I've always been a bigger Stones fan than a Beatles fan. A large part of this has to do with my father's influence: I don't even think he ever owned a Beatles record, which seems to be some kind of mean feat for someone who was a teenager when "Revolver" came out. I think a part of it that there has always been more of a cohesion to the Stones as a group, in that they all seem to be part of a band, instead of four (well, let's be honest, three) talented musicians and songwriters who played together. I think if you played a space alien "Here Comes the Sun" and "Rocky Raccoon" and then followed it up with "I Am the Walrus" they would have any idea that they were by the same band. Play a space alien "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and then follow it with "Sweet NeoCon" from the Stones' most recent album, that alien will most likely be able to tell that they are by the same group of people. That alien will then kill you and declare war on the entire human race. Because that's how bad "Sweet Little NeoCon" is.

"Love is Strong"-My father bought me a remaindered copy of Bill Wyman's autobiography the spring of 1994, and so I was hyper-aware that the Stones were going to be playing with a new bass-player. So I paid extra-close attention to the bass playing on this opening track, which turned out to be a blessing, because it made me not notice Mick Jagger's awful harmonica playing. Let me take that back. His harmonica playing isn't awful in that he is playing the harmonica poorly. Even if you play the harmonica perfectly, like a virtuoso, it will be awful. Because the harmonica is one of the worst instruments in the history of the world. I guess the fact that it's small made it a popular instrument, as opposed to the contra-bassoon, but I think I'd rather listen to a contra-bassoon solo on a song.

"You Got Me Rocking" I wonder, sometimes, how bands like the Stones keep writing new songs. Their lyric conceits tend not to be the most clever in the world, and most of their songs tend to focus on "I'm a man, you're a woman, and either a) I'm really into you in a sexual way or b) you broke my heart and now I'm going sing about it" and I wonder how they keep coming up with different ways to say that same thing over and over again. "You Got Me Rocking"? I bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that sometime in the late 70s early 80s there was a bunch of high school/college kids who formed a really terrible band, and one of the guys in the band wrote a song called "You Got Me Rocking" and they might have even played it in a bar a few times. That guy is now an orthodontist.

"Sparks Will Fly"- I remember in the pre-release to this album there was a lot of press about Mick Jagger was using the f word on several songs. I remember a pretty irate letter to Entertainment Weekly complaining about this, before the album came out, that it showed that Jagger was leaving behind his true fans to court a younger, hipper audiences. Because if there is one thing that the kids really love it's listening to 64 year old men sing about how they want to "f*** your sweet ass." Especially if that 64 year old man looks like their grandmother and is wearing a red silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel.

"The Worst"- Johnny Depp made it cool to be Keith Richards, but even before that, Keith Richards made it cool to be Keith Richards. In many respects, I like his voice more than I like Jagger's, maybe because Jagger always sounds like he is the consummate actor, taking on a role, a role of being a 64-year old man who wants to f*** your sweet ass, and Keith Richards just sounds like he's being honest and singing from his heart. This song he tells you that he is the worst kind of guy to be around, and as cool and inscrutable as he seems in interviews, I'm going to guess based on the sheer amount of heroin and whiskey he has consumed that yes, he is the worst kind of guy to be around. This is a really nice song, though.

"New Faces"-I don't really know the division of labor as far as songwriting goes in the Jagger/Richards partnership, but I think that some songs are mostly written by Keith and finished up by Jagger, some are mostly written by Jagger and finished up by Richards and then they each write songs entirely separate from each other. And every couple of albums I think Mick comes up with the idea to write a song that has a harpsichord in it. Because even though Jagger has more money than he knows what to do with, he didn't get that way by wasting his money. And you know that some night back in the early 70s, he got juiced out of his mind and bought himself a grand harpsichord. And to justify its purchase he hauls it into the studio every five years and makes the other guys play on his harpsichord song. He's not going to let his money go to waste.

"Moon is Up"- This song is awesome. I think I read that they recorded the drums at the bottom of stairwell, far away from the band. I think this might be because nobody in the band really likes Charlie Watts, because he shows up to play the drums dressed like he's actually come to do their taxes. (And we know how the Stones feel about paying taxes.) So they stuck him in the basement and told the engineers to find a way to record his drums from down there. It makes for a really cool drum sound, and the song is really pretty fun, and there's a moment where you can hear Keith laugh as they're starting it, and I love moments like that, where you hear someone count off, or somebody snicker or cough or laugh. Because then I know it wasn't made by robots. Well, except Charlie Watts. He's kind of a robot. But remember, we stuck him down in the basement.

"Out of Tears"-You know that orthodontist who wrote a song called "You Got Me Rocking" for his lame garage band? Well, his cousin was in a band, and one of those guys wrote a song called "Out of Tears" Jesus, how did we make it through thousands of years of popular music without having a major song called "Out of Tears"? Truth be told, this song isn't so bad. But it is sounds exactly like you think a song called "Out of Tears" would sound. There's a great slide solo by Ron Wood in the song, and damned if I don't always forget that he's actually in the band. When I was a kid, I used to see him and think he was Rod Stewart back when Rod Stewart had darker hair. And, yeah, I know they were in the Small Faces together, and I saw that Unplugged they did together, but I'm still not totally convinced.

"I Go Wild"- This song was actually really fun when I saw them play it live. Jesse and I got snuck into Foxborough Stadium (and were then thrown out, and then were snuck back in) to see the Stones that same summer, and I remember thinking then that this song didn't sound so terrible when played beside their classic tunes. I still marvel at how Mick Jagger can basically write the same song over and over again and never sound that sick of it. How did he spice this one up? He threw the C-word into it. I know that that isn't such a huge crime in England, but man, could you imagine that guy who wrote the letter to EW about him using the F-word? He probably had a heart attack when he heard this song. But you know what? That's what the kids are into these days. The C-word. They totally dig it.

"Brand New Car"- That orthodontist is kicking himself that he never sent those demo tapes into the US Copyright office.

"Sweethearts Together"- This is one of those songs that was written about a man and a woman, but is really about Mick and Keith. You can even picture them singing together on the same microphone together, working out the harmonies together. Well, really, probably their lawyers each worked out what the harmonies were going to be. Edward G. Perlman, Esq: "We will stipulate that Mr. Richards will sing a perfect fourth above Mr. Jaggers." Hugh L. Pressman, Esq: "So stipulated. Conditioned on Mr. Richards being allowed to sing in unison with Mr. Jagger when the melody returns to the tonic in the chorus." (Pause) Perlman:"I'll take it to my client."

"Suck on the Jugular"- I'm going to just skip over this one. The Stones literally have a closet filled with tapes of Keith Richards guitar-licks with generic titles on them, like "Start Me Up" "Satisfaction" "Suck on the Jugular" and when they record an album, they go to this cubbard and pull a tape out, and Jagger just free associates over the riff. I mean, how else can you account for the guy who wrote "Gimme Shelter" singing "Been keeping cool, been lying low,been dancing smooth, been dancing slow" ? He spent less than seven seconds on that.

"Blinded by Rainbows"-Remember how like, five seconds ago, I was asking how Jagger could keep writing the same song about "I'm a man and you're a woman" over and over again. Well, I take it all back. Because when he tries to branch out, all hell breaks loose. What the crap is this song about? It talks about explosions and limbs being blown off, and talks a lot about Jesus, but man alive, what does it mean to be blinded by rainbows? Has Jagger ever seen a rainbow? They're fainter than hell. I mean, seriously, I've been out places after it's been raining, and I'll see a rainbow, and I'll point it out to someone, and you should watch them squint their eyes to try and see it. Can you get blinded that way, by trying to look at something too hard? I have to admit I'm not really sure. I remember really liking this song when I was 14, and musically, it's pretty good. And the vocal melody is really nice, too. So nowadays when I listen to it, I just pretend that Mick is singing in Italian or Portuguese, or something. Then I can enjoy it fully.

"Baby Break it Down"- There are some songs I listen to I'm convinced the singer is getting paid for each time he sings the title. If this song were one of those deals, and Mick Jagger wasn't already a millionaire, he would be by the time four minutes and seven seconds it takes him to sing this song was over. Dear god. He sings it an average of once every 7.27 seconds. If this were a drinking game you'd have killed yourself by the time the song was over.

"Thru and Thru"- The second Keith song, and I think that it got some play a few years ago on the Sopranos. It's a great song, and it has a great vocal performance. I also like how it takes several minutes of just Keith and guitar before it really gets going, which surprises the hell out of you when the song really starts to get moving. I'm just going to listen to it, if you don't mind.

Oh, wait, I forgot, Keith drops the f-bomb into this song as well. Because he says that he has the f-in blues, and then that he has the awesome blues, and I'm not really sure what that means. But if Keith Richards says it, it must be kind of awesome. Or kind of f***ed. Or both.

"Mean Disposition"- I wonder how groups sequence their albums, because Thru and Thru is as close to a tour de force as latter-era Stones gets, and the decision to not only follow it up with a song as mediocre as "Mean Disposition" but also end the album with it? I have no words. This song has been on every single Stones album in one form or another since Goat's Head Soup. It was even on their weird psychedelic album with the lenticular cover. Mick says 'yeah' at the beginning of the song, and despite what I said earlier about those kind of exclamations, I HATE this one. It's like Mick is making fun of us for still listening to this crap. It sounds so fake and forced, like when you see some lame band at a bar late at night and the singer says yeah when the guitar player does a blues lick but screws it up, and the singer is standing stockstill just nodding his head to the music. 'Yeah.' We know you're not excited, dude. We know you're up past your bed time. Go back to your orthodontics practice. Leave the rocking to the professionals.

Moral Dilemma of the Day 7/7

2009-07-07T15:21:00.001-04:00

Let's say there is some aspect of your physical appearance that you don't like, but that can't be changed (you feel you're too short, you don't like the color of your eyes) and someone offers to change it for you. You can be five inches taller. You can always have those blue eyes you wanted, or have longer,silkier hair. The only catch is that from that moment on, no one will call you by your name anymore. They will still know you, your relationship with them will in no way change, except that for the rest of your life, no one will ever say your name again. They may call you "honey" or "buddy" or "slim" but you will never again be addressed by your Christian name. What do you do?

LISTENING PARTY: Batman

2009-07-01T14:20:00.001-04:00

Take that, Heath Ledger!

1989 was an important year for me. I of course can remember specific incidents from before then: a day here, an moment or two there. But 1989 was the first time I had a visceral sense of the passing of time. Where I was aware my life existed on a continuum with each day leading from the day before and leading into the next. Some might say this is because I was approaching my tenth birthday and was becoming more aware of time worked. Other might claim that I was beginning to mature and develop my sense of self. But the truth is this: I became cognizant of the passing of time in 1989 solely because I was counting down to the release of the Batman movie.

Nowadays I don't think you can walk six feet without tripping over a superhero/comic based movie, but in 1989 the release of Tim Burton's Batman was unprecedented, especially to a 9 and 5/6 year old boy like myself. I couldn't wait, and in anticipation of the film, I gathered every piece of movie related merchandise I could get my hands on (mainly, since I was so young, other people got it for me, but I was such a willing recipient.)

So I had the Batman action figures, the Batman movie novelization, the Batman poster and sticker book, the Batman cereal. I even had the Batman shaped piggy-bank. But the strangest Batman-related item I owned was Prince's Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. I begged for this, even though BOTH my mother and father asked me several times if I was sure I wanted it, because they were certain I wouldn't enjoy it. How wrong they were!

"The Future"-The album opens with dialogue from Michael Keaton's amazing "Tell all your friends about me" line from the film. And just as the crook he's dangling over the edge of the building whimpers, "What are you?" Prince's funky drum machine kicks in to answer: I'm the funky Batman, retard. This song's only relation to the film is that it quotes Jack Nicholson's "Think about the future" line. So much of the 1989 Batman film boils down to a collection of little catchphrases that I'd heard well before I went to opening night with my dad on June 23, 1989. I marvel that anybody at Warner Brothers thought that Prince, who looks like a Batman villain, should do the soundtrack, but it's one of those decisions that seems so brilliant in its stupidity that whoever came up with it must've been an idiot savant like Rain Man. Which also came out in 1989. It comes full circle.

"Electric Chair"-If I knew anything about electric guitars back in 1989 I'd have been pretty impressed by Prince's playing on this track. But at the time I was probably just waiting for him to drop a Riddler reference into the lyrics. As it stands, this song has nothing to do with Batman at all, except that its chorus says that if a man can be considered guilty for what goes on in his mind then give him the electric chair for all the dirty things he's going to think. This just shows how little Prince understood Batman. The Caped Crusader is against capital punishment, which is why the Joker is able to kill dozens of people every time he escapes. Because Batman won't even put someone in the electric chair for the crimes they actually commit, nevermind those that go on in their minds. My best guess is that Prince wrote this song before he ever heard of the Batman movie, probably as part of his deal with the devil to write two songs every hour in exchange for girls not laughing at how short he is. Seriously, Prince is really, really short,but still gets lots of beautiful women. And he writes a lot of songs. I think the connection is obvious.

"The Arms of Orion"-Sheena Easton? Whatever happened to Vicki Vale? And this song, again to the disappointment of 9 and 5/6 year old Ryan, has nothing to do with Batman whatsoever. And what are the arms of Orion? I'm seriously not up on my astronomy, so I wouldn't even know where to look. Also, how much stargazing do you think they get to do in Gotham City, with that Bat-signal shining all the time? I suppose you have bigger concerns than star-gazing when at any moment you could get impaled on a giant umbrella by the Penguin. This song sounds like it was written for Barbara Streisand instead of for the Dark Knight. Very disappointing. I mean the song is decent, it just doesn't inspire me to go out and strike fear into the hearts of criminals. It does make me want to invest in a Fairlight synthesizer and tympani drums.

Partyman by Prince from the film Batman

"Partyman"- I just heard the Joker! He said something before this song started! That's what I'm talking about. Prince deliberated speeds up his voice in this song, similar to how he did it in the song Kiss, which in 1989 I hadn't heard yet. In 1989 I wasn't so concerned with how Prince was kind of doing lamer versions of better songs he'd already written so much as I was with how he was insisting on calling Joker "Partyman" They do play this song in the movie, when Joker is destroying all the artwork in the museum, which seems like kind of a crazy party, if you ask me. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is the kind of party Prince has for his birthday.

"Vicki Waiting"- This song has it all. Jack Nicholson voice sample, ringing phone sound effects, name of Batman character in the title. It also has a dirty joke in the first verse about the size of Batman's organ. This is probably the only time in the thousands of Batman stories that someone has accused the Dark Detective of stuffing his codpiece. I think Prince=sex for most people (which a week after the passing of Michael Jackson reminded us that for most people Michael Jackson = sexless freak. Complete opposites) so he adds an inappropriate sexual edge to what is probably the least sexual character to dress up in an all rubber suit ever.

"Trust" This song is also from the movie, where the Joker lures the denizens of Gotham City to his parade so he can give them free money then gas them to death. I'm surprised more politicians haven't attempted this tack. I think even when I was 9 and 5/6 years old I could tell that Prince played all the instruments himself, and I think this track is the most obvious about it. Oh, sweet, a Robert Wuhl vocal sample. I remember feeling like I should watch his show Arliss when it premiered out of some kind of outdated loyalty to this movie. That's how important Batman was to me back then. If you were in the movie, I treated you like royalty. The actor Pat Hingle played Commissioner Gordon and for years afterwards, I would watch any shitty movie that was on UHF Saturday afternoons if I saw his little hangdog face in it.

"Orange Crush"- I love this drink. Oh, wait, the title is "Lemon Crush" which sounds even tastier. This song is one of my favorites on the record, even though it is even further away from the movie than all the other tracks. The liner notes tell you who is "singing" each song, and this one is credited to Vicki Vale for some reason, even though one of the verses actually uses the word "jobba" which, as all my fellow nerds will recognize as the name of the slug gangster from Return of the Jedi. I think my 9 and 5/6 year old self would have killed to have Batman team up with Han Solo to battle Two-Face and Boba Fett. It was never meant to be. And if it happened now, I would probably kill someone to PREVENT it from happening.

"Scandalous"- This song is "sung" by Batman. Not even Bruce Wayne. I think I would really like to see a Batman musical. I know that Jim Steinman, the guy who wrote all of Meatloaf's songs, wrote one ten years ago, and his sturm und drung approach to rock music with bad punning titles is maybe even more inappropriate to Batman than Prince's slow-groove sex music. Example: In this song, Batman tells...someone...that he can't wait to wrap his legs around them. Usually if Batman wraps his legs around you, it is because he is trying to break your spine while his hands are bound behind his back. People he might be saying this to: Killer Croc, Mad Hatter, Bane. I don't think Prince means it the same way, though. Also, and this might be my lack of sexual knowledge here, but isn't it more common for the lady to wrap her legs around the man? But then again, Prince is in to some pretty freaky shit. I mean, Batman is, too, but in a different way. I mean Batman might dress up like a bat and terrorize the criminal element, but he isn't the kind of guy who would wrap his legs around a girl in a romantic gesture. I mean, c'mon.

"Bat Dance" What.the.hell.is.this. When I was a kid, I begged my mom to let me watch MTV when this premiered, as I wasn't typically allowed to watch it. And sweet lord. Check out this link if you thought your life was complete without a bunch of dancing Batmen in it. I know mine wasn't. This song isn't so much a song as a sound collage of random snippets of dialogue from the film against so bad they should be outlawed drum machines and an actually pretty rad guitar solo. And in this way, Prince is just like Batman: both see a world that is falling apart at the seams, and each has found his own way to try and make that world right. Batman strikes out into the night to avenge the death of his parents to try and prevent anyone from suffering like he has. Prince dresses up like the Joker (and he started doing this at least 5 years before the movie came out) and records an average of one album every six hours to avenge the fact that he is only 4 feet 11 inches tall. Which was exactly how tall I was in 1989, when I popped this cassette into my boombox, stared at the giant bat emblem on the tape cover, and got superfreaked in the ear for forty-two minutes. Luckily, I got taller.

This was probably the best day of my life to this point.

The Despot

2009-06-26T08:32:00.000-04:00

So I've been thinking about Kriss Kross this morning. My first, and probably only real memory, of the young rap duo stems from one Monday morning when I was in seventh grade, and seemingly everybody, everybody cool at least, was wearing their overalls backwards. I had no idea what this meant, but that was because I didn't watch "In Living Color" and the Sunday night before, Kriss Kross had performed on the show, wearing their overalls backwards. I'm from a small suburban town, and so the moment that people here decide something is cool, it usually means that the rest of the world is already dangerously close to being tired of it.

The Kriss Kross fad didn't last very long. They were a one-hit wonder, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I feel like their pop ascendancy was shorter than most. It culminated in a bunch of white 12-year-olds in southeastern Massachusetts wearing their overalls backwards one Monday morning.

What made me think of Kriss Kross was the death of Michael Jackson. MTV has been running his videos all morning (well, at least since 4:30 when I got up and started watching.) I have a lot of mixed feelings about Jackson, probably all the same mixed feelings that everybody else has: Thriller is awesome/child molestation is not. But I caught two videos by him that I'd never seen before. The first was the song "Jam", which features, bringing it full circle, Kriss Kross.

The significance of this didn't hit me until I saw the video for "Liberian Girl." It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. First of all, the song is low down in the mix, so that we can catch all the little dialogue between the 400 zillion stars who cameo in the video. (From wikipedia: Paula Abdul,Rosanna Arquette,Dan Aykroyd,Mayim Bialik,Jackie Collins, David Copperfield, Richard Dreyfuss,Corey Feldman, Lou Ferrigno,Debbie Gibson,Danny Glover,Steve Guttenberg,Whoopi Goldberg, Sherman Hemsley, Amy Irving,Malcolm-Jamal Warner,Beverly Johnson, Quincy Jones, Don King,Virginia Madsen,Olivia Newton-John, Brigitte Nielsen, Lou Diamond Phillips, Ricky Schroder, Steven Spielberg, Suzanne Somers, John Travolta, Blair Underwood, Carl Weathers, Billy Dee Williams, "Weird Al" Yankovic all make appearances) You can barely hear what Jackson is singing, and he only shows up at the last seconds of the video. Check it out yourselves:

Watch enough Michael Jackson videos (and I'll admit, I hadn't seen one in probably a decade, until this morning's video wake) and you'll see, in the later ones, the ones after "Thriller", littered with stars. "Liberian Girl" is the worst example I've ever seen, but one of his last videos, for "Rock My World" has what may be the last appearance of Marlon Brando ever. So I thought about "Liberian Girl" and I thought about Kriss Kross, and I thought about Michael Jackson. One of the media outlets I was watching last night referred to Michael Jackson as the "Self-professed" king of pop. And so this morning, it all came together.

There was probably a kid you went to school with who wasn't really very popular, or even noticed most of the time. And that kid one day does something: makes a joke, makes a really cool play during a baseball game in gym class, gets cheers as he break-dances at the 7th and 8th grade dance. And then that kid, reveling in the attention, does it again. And again. And again. With diminishing returns each time. He'll never be able to catch that lightning in a bottle again. That's Michael Jackson.

Jackson was clearly an enomorously talented individual. Even the worst of his solo material is meticulously produced. But his problem, one of his problems, was that he needed you to notice it. He called himself the King of Pop, and then he needed to prove it, everytime he did anything. "Look at me. Look all the famous people who want to be in my video! They wouldn't want to do it, if I wasn't the King of Pop."

So the significance of Kriss Kross? That Monday morning, 17 years ago, when the kids in my class work their overalls backwards, signaling the death knell of Kriss Kross's cultural significance? They made their appearance in Jackson's "Jam" video AFTER that.

Kings are kings by birthright. "Self-proclaimed" kings are despots by definition. History is littered with leaders who have named themselves kings, or supreme or dear leaders, and the ends of their reigns are all marked by increasingly paranoid demonstrations of their power, to the detriment of their people, and to themselves. They need people to believe they're powerful, even more so than they need to actually BE powerful.

Michael Jackson could've continued to make great music if he wasn't so concerned with being the King of Pop. Of chasing around the biggest names to appear on his records and in his videos to prove it. His last record, "Invincible" featured a cameo by Notorious B.I.G., who had died six years before, and while that more likely speaks to the deliberate speed with which he recorded his albums, it also a haunting reminder how behind popular culture he had become. His idea of a big name rapper to open his record of the new millenium was someone who had died half a decade earlier.

Michael Jackson will hopefully be remembered more for his early, brilliant work, instead of the scandals that plagued the last third of his life. But as I watched him dance around with Kriss Kross, or get chased by Eddie Murphy dressed as a pharaoh, or awkwardly kissing Iman, or hanging out with a rapping Maculay Culkin on a stoop, all I could think was: The Dear Leader of Pop. Clinging to his title at the expense of everything else. May history be kinder to him.

Moral Dilemma of the Day 6/23

2009-06-23T12:31:00.000-04:00

You are walking through the woods when you see a person you've never met before up a tree trying to escape from a lion. You don't know what to do, when a tiny leprechaun approaches and says that there is a 50/50 chance that the guy in the tree might be able to escape the lion without any intervention, but if you want to make sure he'd survive, the leprechaun can guarantee the man's safety. The only price is that you will have severe acne for the rest of your life. It will never go away, and no medical treatment or cover-ups will ever be able to conceal it. The leprechaun says that's the deal: leave the man to his fate, or save him and suffer pizza face forever. What do you do?

Workingman's Blues Part 2: The Drop Box is Missing

2009-06-22T09:13:00.000-04:00

I'll always remember her name, because she made sure that I would. "It's Stacia Newcomb," she told me. "As opposed to Stacia Oldbrush." That and she was cute. And she was loitering inside the Hollywood Video where I was working as a manager for hours. And she told me I was wasting my life. You tend not to forget these things.

When I graduated high school, I was offered a job at the local Blockbuster Video, mainly because my buddy Dan was dating the manager's daughter. I worked there for twenty-nine months, and when I left I had worked my way up to Assistant Manager and I had also decided I didn't want to work at a video store anymore. I put in my five weeks' notice (that was how important to the organization--two weeks would not be nearly sufficient amount of time to find a replacement) and planned to get a job waiting tables at the 99 restaurant that was just opening up next door. But one of my last nights working at Blockbuster, I received a phone call from Hollywood Video. They were opening two stores in the area, and they wanted me to come be the store manager for one of them. As ridiculous as it might seem, Hollywood Video had headhunters.

I was only 20 years old, and apt to follow the path of least resistance, so I accepted the Hollywood Video job, with a caveat: I did not want to be a store manager, but an assistant manager. The regional manager from Hollywood tried to convince me that I should take the store manager position, as it had a salary of $26,500 with benefits not understanding that was the exact reason I didn't want to take it. I knew that I was 20 years old, and knew that I was apt to follow the path of least resistance, and that a job that paid a 20 year old who still lived at home with his parents $26,500 was a path of least resistance as well as a path that would lead me to becoming a 46-year video store manager. I figured that once I started making that kind of money it would be hard for me to ever give it up. So I insisted on taking the lower paying, less responsibility job.

I spent one really long Sunday (7am-9:30pm without any significant breaks)setting up the new Hollywood video store in Whitman with two young guys from Colorado who were big fans of David Foster Wallace, which meant I was able to talk about "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" all day. These guys weren't going to be working at the store--their jobs meant they were flown all around the country helping setting up Hollywood Video stores--but I thought it might bode well for my new co-workers. The hardest part of leaving Blockbuster was all the friends that I had made working there, (many of them still among my best friends today) but alas, this was not to be the case.

For reasons unknown, I was transferred to the Hanson store. My hopes of having a bunch of young and hip coworkers were fairly quickly dashed: not only was the store manager Donna middle-aged, the entire staff was over 40. One woman named Mary was probably well into her 60s. Before we opened, Donna had hired at least one teenager that I can remember, but for the most part I was the one young person among a cast of older people, like Steve Guttenberg in "Cocoon."

In addition to Donna and Mary, there Carol, who became another shift supervisor/manager on duty, as well as Frank and his wife. They both worked at Raytheon and took this job as something fun to do together. Frank was made an M.O.D. along with Carol, and since his wife was just a customer service representative (CSR) they hardly ever were scheduled to work together, which I think defeated the point of getting the job, and Frank's wife quit shortly thereafter. There was even a second Donna, who I assumed was some friend of the other Donna's, although I don't know why I thought that, other than the fact that the two Donna's were scheduled to open the store Monday through Friday.

But then something happened to Donna before we opened: the regional manager was very cagey with where she was, just that she was going to be missing for the first three weeks. I overheard that she had been hospitalized, and my thoughts went immediately to hysterectomy, because it seemed like the kind of procedure a woman of Donna's age might undergo, and one that has enough of a stigma surrounding it that it would be kept a secret. Although looking back on it now, "nervous breakdown" also fits that description, and fits in with what happened later.

So, without our store manager, and with me being the only of the management staff who had ever worked in a video store before, I became the de facto store manger for our store's opening two weeks, which is what I had been initially hired for, minus of course the salary. I didn't mind. Donna had kind of freaked me out, and I liked not really having her around. I did have to work with the second Donna a couple of times, and she creeped the hell out of me. The regional manager came down to help out, but for the most part, I ran the opening two weeks of Hollywood Video Hanson without any incident.

When Donna came back, she returned a much angrier woman. Everything I did was the subject of some kind of stern talking to in the office, which unlike every other job I've ever held, was in the front of the store, right next to the front window. She didn't like the ties I wore. If I came in with a day's stubble, I'd get spoken to about it. I remember she once spoke to me about being too nice to some girls who came in. Dear God, I hated everything about it.

And then one Saturday night I was working, and Stacia Newcomb came in. She might have been stoned, or drunk, or just an odd duck, but she spent a good amount of time hanging around the front counter, talking to me. And she told me a lot about herself, her desire to become an actor, her commitment to the arts, but what I remember most of all was her chastisement. I was wasting my life, she told me, working in a video store. I can't say that the thought hadn't occurred to me, but things always sound so much more cogent and profound when spoken by a beautiful girl.

Luckily, it wasn't too much longer after that that events conspired to end my time at Hollywood video. Hollywood had a free-standing return drop-box on the sidewalk outside the store, which allowed people to pull up and return their videos without getting out of their car, probably the only way in which Hollywood was superior to Blockbuster video. I came in one Thursday night to work, and the drop box was gone.

I was relieving Donna, so when I came onto my shift I asked her about it. She brought me into the front office. "Frank stole it." That didn't make any sense, I said. How can you be sure? Donna had some story about the security cameras from the front office catching it, although looking at the angle of the cameras in relation to the front window, I sincerely doubted that. I was confused, but didn't fight her too much. Until she told me that when Frank came in to pick up his check it was my job to tell him he was fired.

I told her that I wouldn't do it, that it was above my pay-grade, and that if she wanted Frank fired, she would have to do it herself. Part of it was my affection for Frank. I wouldn't say we were friends, since he was older than my father, but he was a nice guy and always very friendly. Another part was that I felt there was something really fishy about the whole thing. Unlike taking a nutty like she usually did, Donna just kind of nodded and said she would take care of it.

She left for the night and I was thoroughly confused about the missing return drop-box. It must've been some high school kids or something. It just had prank written all over it. Why would Frank take it? It didn't make sense.

Carol came in next for her check, and she was acting weird. I had worked with her the least, but she was also very pleasant and friendly usually, so her cagey behavior was out of the ordinary. She hung around a lot longer than I expected her to, and seemed to be watching me carefully. Frank called to see if the checks were in, and when he told me he was on his way, I decided to tell Carol what Donna had told me. I brought her into the front office. "Donna told me to fire Frank," I said. "She said he stole the drop box."

Carol looked shocked. "Really?" she said. "Because Donna called me at work today and told me that YOU took the drop box."

When Frank came in, we brought him on board and he told us that Donna had called him at work to tell him that Carol had taken the drop box. I still to this day have no idea why Donna did this, unless it was her version of divide and conquer that would only work if you were trying to divide and conquer a group of Fraggles. There was no way it was going to work with intelligent adults.

We all quit that night. We called the regional manager, explained the situation, and said we were leaving without notice. I said I would keep my store key until the next payday to insure that Donna couldn't try and hold my last paycheck from me. We left Donna a note, signed by all three of us, locked up the store and all went home. On my way home, I drove past the back of the store and saw the Drop Box next to the dumpster. None of it made any sense.

That Sunday afternoon, I received a call from the teenage girl who worked at the store. She asked me when I was coming in. I told her that I had quit and didn't work there anymore. She sounded confused, and said okay. But Donna had left her at the store at 11:00 and she was supposed to be off at 3:00, but now it was 5:15 and nobody was there to relieve her. Donna had told the girl that I was on my way in, and the poor girl had waited 6 hours to call and check to see where I was. I went in and sent her home, closed out the registers and locked the money in the safe (to make sure that Donna couldn't try and claim that I had taken any money), vacuumed the store (I don't know why I did this) hung a sign up on the door saying we were closing early, then locked the door and threw my key into the return slot. I never went back, not even to get my last check. It showed up a month later in the mail.

A few days later, I received a call from the regional manager, explaining that it was Donna and her boyfriend who had removed the drop box, and Donna had been let go. He offered his apologies, and asked me to come back and work at the store. He offered me the manager's position again, even offered to raise the salary if I'd come back. He said he was planning on calling Frank and Carol and asking them to come back as my management staff. I politely declined. Even the fact that Donna was gone, that I was going to be the boss of the store, wasn't enough to get the voice of Stacia Newcomb out of my head. Within six months I would begin work as a substitute teacher, which was the beginning of my career in education.

Three years later, I was working at the local middle school as the building sub, and I took the eighth grade class I was subbing for to a school assembly about Anne Frank. Miss Frank was being portrayed by a young actress named Stacia Newcomb. I recognized her immediately and during the Q & A following the performance, I especially recognized the tone in her voice, the one that had told me that I was wasting my time by not using my abilities for the greater good. I wanted to go up after the presentation to tell her that I had followed her advice, that I had made a decision about how I wanted to live my life, how I wanted to contribute to the world. But it was only 12:35, and there was still lots of work to be done.

Workingman's Blues Part I: You Work 3-7.

2009-06-19T12:01:00.000-04:00

I met Krissy on the bus. For a two year period, starting when I was 15, we were best friends. We rode to school together, hung out every day after school, even went to the prom together. And one day, I even dressed up in her clothes and went to work for her.

Krissy worked at the Honey Dew Donuts in Whitman center, and as far as it concerned me, it just meant she wasn't available to hang out Saturday afternoons. She didn't really talk much about it, at least as far as I can remember. But that wasn't really her style. So when she did complain, I knew to pay attention. Her family had been planning a clambake for the upcoming Saturday, and Kris had requested the day weeks off in advance, and had been promised by her boss that she would have it off. But when she went in that Friday to pick up her check, she saw her name still on the schedule. And she pleaded with her boss, told him he had told her that she'd have that day off, and he brushed her aside. "Nobody else could work then."

So she was going to quit. She was going to not even show up, just forget the whole thing. Her boss was an asshole. She wasn't going to miss her family's clambake, she had requested it off. The whole thing was stupid and unfair. It wasn't worth the five bucks an hour. Krissy was going to have to quit soon anyway, because she was spending a month down in Florida with her sister that summer. She was just going to quit now.

"You know what would be funny?" I said. My fiancee hears this phrase now and she gets chills. She's learned that my idea of things that 'would be funny' are usually horrible and crippingly awkward, and she bristles at the mere thought of it. Krissy wasn't quite so squeamish.

So the plan was, I would put on Krissy's pink Honey Dew donuts workshirt, show up at her work at 3:00 and pretend that I was her replacement. I thought it would be really funny to watch her stupid boss squirm at this boy wearing a far too small pink workshirt claiming he was his new employee.

I lived within walking distance of the Honey Dew, so I put the shirt on and walked, in broad daylight, the 1.5 miles to the shop. I think this says a lot about my character when I was a teenager. I wasn't frightened to walk around in pubic looking like a complete douchebag. I walked into the front door, and I got my first glimpse of the manager, Krissy's boss, who I soon knew as Sam the Donut Man. It was the first time I got nervous about my little plan. Sam looked like Manuel Noriega, and I was the kind of erudite kid who knew what the former military leader of Panama looked like. His resting face was a permanent grimace, and if he had ever smiled, I imagine it would have been even scarier.

I told him that I was Krissy's replacement. He squinted one eye and looked me up and down. "You work 3 to 7," he said. He grabbed some cash out of the register and he left me alone in the store. For the afternoon. I had my first ever official job. I was scared shitless.

I have no memory of him showing me how anything worked, but I'm going to have to admit that he must have. But I had no formal training period. I showed up at three o'clock and I was relieved at seven, and for a long time in between then I was alone in the Honey Dew. A bell kept going off that I eventually figured out was someone coming up to the drive through. I had no idea what a regular coffee was, so when people ordered it, I just gave them a black coffee. That first day, these two guys in a pick-up truck who looked and smelled like they had been getting stoned since at least early that morning if not since the mid-1970s came through the drive through not once nor twice but thrice, each time coming up with some kind of new insult to hurl at me. The second time they called me 'miss' and I seem to think that they called me Shirley once. They did however tip me quite well. What that means is something I haven't really thought about, and don't ever really want to.

Between the front of the store and the drive up window was a corridor with the "break-room" which was really just a closet to hang up your coat or put your bags. There was also a payphone, which would ring at random intervals, and I only answered it after it had rung four or five times.

"Why don't you answer phone?" It was Sam the Donut man. I discovered that it was always Sam the Donut Man. I don't know who else would call a Honey Dew Donuts. Customers, wondering if there were any French crullers left? Sam asked me for my Social Security number. I didn't know it off the top of my head, and I still didn't think I was really working there, and I didn't even really know what a Social Security number even really was. He told me to get it, then hung up.

Meanwhile, people were lining up at the drive up and the older folks lining up at the front counter. They wanted coffees that were light with milk, dark with cream, two sugars, three sugars, iced, French vanilla, almond roasted, things I had no idea what any of them meant. But there must have been something cute about how completely inept I seemed, because I made crazy tips that afternoon, at least to a 15 year old. I made over twenty bucks, and when an older woman came to relieve me, I was able to buy not just one, but two cassette tapes from Strawberries (Neil Young's Mirrorball and Warren Zevon's Mutineer) and still had a few bucks left over. And the next Saturday when I went in, there was a check waiting for me for $17.49. It was more money than I could have ever possibly spent. As hard as it is to believe now.

The second week I came into work, Sam wasn't there. There was a morning girl, who left when I came in. I was kind of relieved that I didn't have to see Noriega that I nearly crapped myself when he pulled up to the drive-up window. "You told me you were 17!" he yelled at me. "You lied to me!" I thought maybe he had me confused with someone else, because I hadn't really said anything to him at all the week before when he had left me alone to mind his store. Cars started to line up behind his, so he just shook his finger at me, telling me again that I had told him I was 17, and then he drove off.

And so the summer went. I would put on my pink shirt (I was given one that fit eventually) and I slowly learned how to make coffee, how to accurately use the register (before I just looked at the price on the menu and did the math in my head and hit the no sale button, which gave Sam no idea how much money was supposed to be in the drawer after my shift, so I could have robbed him blind, but it never really occurred to me.) And each week the phone would ring and it would be Sam, asking me some question about something I had no idea about. Tara hadn't come in (I had no idea who Tara was.) I didn't know when the last batch of iced coffee had been made (I didn't even know we made the iced coffee there.) And the same few old people sat there all afternoon, and the same few people came in through the drive-in.

A few weeks in, I started to get comfortable enough to get my swagger back, so I came to work dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, and told the customers it was our "Tropical Island" weekend, but when they asked what kind of specials came along with that, I had to admit I had just made it up. I tried to come up with some catchphrases to say when I rang people up, but most just confused the customers and none of them ever stuck. I think the last thing you want to hear the 15 year old boy making your coffee say is "Shazam!" when he hands it to you.

The only really exciting thing that ever happened was a phone call one Saturday in late July. I answered it, assuming it was Sam, only to hear a woman's voice. She was looking for Sam, and when I told her he wasn't there, she said okay and hung up. She called back ten minutes later and asked me for a favor. She told me her name was Michelle. Sam owned the apartment building next door, and she rented one of the flats. "There's a man inside my apartment," she told me. "I need you to go over there and tell him to answer my phone."

At the age of 15 I would've done anything a woman told me, so I climbed out the drive-up window (I don't know why I did this, other than I didn't want the people in the front seeing me leaving the shop unattended) and I walked next door to this woman's apartment. There were a lot of things swimming through my mind when I rang the buzzer, especially the phrase "There's a man in my apartment." Not my husband, not my boyfriend, not my brother. A man. There's a man in my apartment. The phrase sounded familiar.

The man in her apartment answered the door, and looked at me with derision. Who was this boy in a pink shirt ringing the bell of the apartment that he was in, that belonged to some woman who had an unknown relationship to him? There was a tiny dog yipping at the crack in the door. "What?"

I told him that Michelle had called. "She wants to you answer the phone." I could hear it ringing over the dog's yipping.

He seemed kind of groggy or stoned (I had gotten used to what that looked like, working the drive up window) and confused. "What?"

"Michelle," I said a little bit louder. "She wants you to answer your phone."

The dog was yipping more ferociously until the man in Michelle's apartment kicked it, and it scurried away whimpering.

"Who are you?" he asked. With everything quiet now, I was able to explain who I was, and how I knew that Michelle wanted him to answer her phone. He said okay and closed the door. I heard that dog whimper in my dreams that night.

But otherwise, it was what ever teenage job ever was. Boring, repetitive, and eventually, once summer ended, over. I gave my two weeks that October and never saw Sam the Donut Man again.

It wasn't a very exciting job, and when I talk about my working history, I usually skip over it like one skips over that girl you "dated" for three days in sixth grade when talking about your romantic life. Krissy came back from Florida and we slowly kind of drifted apart, as she grew more disillusioned with life outside of the Sunshine State, and as I began dating her best friend. Her next job was working at a local restaurant as a waitress and she complained about that job at lot more. Whether it was more difficult, or that it was just one other thing that was making her unhappy I don't know. I tried to make a joke about waitressing, and about how there were probably worse jobs to be had, and she looked at me a minute like she was about to say "Why don't you try walking a mile in my shoes?" before she stopped herself and realized that I kind of already had.

Moral Dilemma of the Day 6/18

2009-06-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

You can have any superpower imaginable: super-strength, flight, x-ray vision, the ability to read minds. Whatever you can think of. The trade-off? You will lose your sense of taste forever. You may be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or fly around the Earth at the speed of sound, but you will never be able to taste prime rib again. Strawberry milkshakes will just be cold liquid in your mouth. You may be able to use your newfound superpowers for the good of all mankind, but would it be worth it if you can never taste your chicken broccoli ziti again?

LISTENING PARTY: Awake

2009-06-16T11:15:00.000-04:00

I don't remember when I first heard about John Wesley Harding, but I do remember that when I did, it was in reference to his reputation as "Elvis Costello-lite." I remember being slightly disappointed when I finally tracked down a JWH album and didn't really find that he had very much in common with Costello at all. I learned later that he used two thirds of the Attractions as his backing band on his first two records, so that might be where the comparison comes into play. But in the early summer of 1999 when I bought the only JWH CD I could find, "Awake", I was almost offended by how unElvisCostellolike it was. But then again, I was 20 years old and was fond of portmanteaus like unElvisCostellolike. I've clearly gotten over that now.

"Good Morning (I Just Woke Up)"- This song starts out with an alarm going off, and the song coming out of a cheap radio speaker. It is thirty five seconds long. I remember being disappointed that such a catchy number would be so truncated. I've since heard the full version, and thirty five seconds was about right.

"Your Ghost Doesn't Scare Me Anymore"-I've heard every JWH album by now, but Awake was my first, so at the time I didn't realize exactly how many songs about ghosts he'd written. I imagined when I was 20 that this was a metaphorical ghost, like the singer can't help but be haunted by the memory of someone, but now I believe it's supposed to be taken literally, and now that I'm 30, I think this increases its awesomeness by 4000%. I like the idea that somebody might eventually become friends with the ghosts in their house. Like why didn't Scooby and Shaggy just try giving some of those ghosts Scooby Snacks? It might have made their problems a lot easier.

"Windowseat"-One of the biggest things I learned since my overly serious young adulthood, is that not everything is metaphorical. This is a song about a boy being born aboard an aeroplane. I swore that this was supposed to be symbolic, but really, JWH just decided to write a kind of Dickensian story about a little boy who is born and lives his entire life aboard an aeroplane. The chorus? "I know I've got the whole world at my feet from my windowseat." Most songwriters would never have entertained such a notion, deciding instead that there were songs that needed to be written about how women do you wrong, or baby let's get into some make of automobile and blow this town we're in, because we're tramps or whatever. Not John Wesley Harding. He wants to write songs about stuff you've never thought about. Like what it would be like to live your entire life aboard an aeroplane. I give this song an A quintillion plus for awesomeness.

"Burn"-Another thing JWH does? He writes a song called Burn and then builds a drum loops out of flicking lighters and lit matches. Basically, we're all going to burn in hell, according to the singer. My favorite bit is when he tells his lover to put him atop the funeral pyre, and then have the house band play 'Light My Fire' which he has selected mainly for its mention of fire, because it's a terrible song, and the 'fire' is metaphorical, which we have already established is not how JWH rolls.
One thing that I think is really cool is that during the choruses, when the full drum kit comes in, you can still hear the matches and lighter loop. Because that's how he rolls, too.

"It's All My Fault"-The middle third of the album drags a bit, and it starts here. This is a pretty good tune, especially when the female voice in the chorus tells JWH that it's all his fault, and he apologizes for writing this song. He does a much better song around this theme on his next record called "I'm Wrong About Everything" which might be his most famous song thanks to its appearance in the movie "High Fidelity" which tells you all you need to know about JWH's career: he's a terrific songwriter who most people have only heard for thirty seconds in the background of a movie starring John Cusack. For comparision, think about that awful Aerosmith song from the movie "Armageddon" Couldn't JWH have gotten some love for that song, seeing as how he's actually written songs about the armageddon? And I bet somewhere in his vast catalog of unreleased songs he has one about the government sending a team of miners to stop an asteroid from destroying the earth. Because that's how JWH rolls.

"Sweat, Tears, Blood and Come"- The title of this song sounds like the album title of some Norwegian Metal band. It's actually a really pretty little melody, with the unfortunate fact that he references "come" like seventeen times. Also, is that how that word is spelled? He is British, so perhaps that's how they spell it over there. Except it would be ironic, since the original British words we Americanize by dropping the 'u', like favour vs. favor, rumour vs rumor, et cetera. But in this case, apparently, we actually added a 'u'. I mean, we also dropped the 'o' and 'e' and maybe it isn't a British spelling thing at all, but more just one of those record label things where they didn't want the word cum to appear on the back of the CD, so they used the other spelling even though grammatically it doesn't really make very much sense. But then again, neither does using the spelling on a CD jacket as an etymology lesson. PS-This song is way way too long, if you couldn't have guessed by the above diatribe.

"Poor Heart"- I don't know if JWH thought much about the sequencing of this album, putting all these slower numbers right in the middle. Maybe it's a concept album about being asleep, and this is the part of the night when you're asleep and nothing happens. You aren't dreaming, you aren't rolling around restlessly. You're just snoring and farting. At least, that's what I do in the middle of the night. This song doesn't really do much for me. He just keeps talking about his body parts and how poor they are. Poor eyes, poor mouth, poor head, poor gallbladder, poor clavicle. What he should've done is written a song about a body part that becomes independently wealthy. Like an old lady dies and leaves her fortune to her young next door neighbor's spleen. And then he has to try and haggle with the spleen to get the money. That actually sounds like next summer's Eddie Murphy movie.

"Miss Fortune"-We pick things up with this song about a young orphan boy who gets adopted by a wealthy older man who makes him dress up like a girl. The first verse of the song is like half of a Dickens' novel: "I was born with a coathanger in my mouth, and I was dumped down south. I was found by the richest man in the world, he brought me up as a girl. My sheets are satin but my minds a mess, there are worse things I confess than having tea in a pretty dress." That's like a hundred pages of a cross-dressing version of Oliver Twist. JWH actually wrote a novel based on the story of this song,(true story) and it's pretty good, but the song is way better. Mainly because it has a glass harmonica solo in it. That's when you play wine glasses by rubbing your wet finger across the rim. Name one novel that has that.

"Song I Wrote Myself in the Future"- One thing pop music doesn't deal with much is time travel. Like actual time travel, and not some kind of symbolic thing. So JWH has decided he is going to write himself and send back in time to an earlier version of himself. The best part is that he doesn't seem to give himself any real practical advice, which is kind of how I imagine actual time travel going down. Like you would go back in time to meet your earlier self, and I bet most of us would forget all the things we'd want to warn our former selves about and instead just start reminiscing about stuff from both of our pasts. "Remember when we were five? Man, Cookie Crisp was delicious."

"Something to Write Home About"-This song is very reminiscient of "Poor Heart" except much better written. Which as a songwriter I can confirm is something that happens: you write a song that's not that good, but then you borrow parts you like from it to write a new, better song. What you shouldn't do is include both songs on the same album, like two songs away from each other. And you certainly shouldn't put the weaker song on first, because I think if I heard this song first, I'd like it a whole lot more. And I'd like it a whole lot more if I'd never heard "Poor Heart" at all. During the song there's some kind of sound effect that sounds like a gerbil running in a wheel, and I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what it is, so that's the other thing I wouldn't do: I wouldn't write a song that sounds a lot like a song I already wrote and then put both songs on the album, and I wouldn't use a weird and totally distracting sound effect on the better of the two songs. I don't know who told JWH this album needed to have forty-seven songs on it, but obviously he's never heard Led Zeppelin IV. That album only has like three and a half songs on it.

"You Were Looking At Me"-This is clearly not the best JWH album, as I'm really struggling to think of things to say to cover for the fact that a lot of these songs are just middling to okay. If I had to recommend a JWH album to purchase, I would recommend 2000's "The Confessions of St. Ace" or 1992's "Why We Fight" which are both superior albums. But this one was first, and it will always remind me of a specific period of my life, and particularly a specific night from that period, when I didn't even listen to this album. And while I bought this album the week that Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was released, that wasn't the night that this album reminds me of. Because, really, I don't ever want to be reminded of the Phantom Menace.

"You Little So & So" Okay, I'm listening now to the remastered deluxe version of this album right now, and I know this wouldn't really go with the whole "deluxe" version idea, but if I were JWH, when I rereleased this album I would've cut out "Poor Heart" and "You Were Looking At Me", kind of like when the Coen brothers released their director's cut of their first movie "Blood Simple" they cut like ten minutes out of it, instead of adding thirty, like most people do. JWH should've streamlined the album because it would've flowed a lot better without the really dirgey songs. And actually if I'm pretending I'm JWH, what I'd actually do is go back in time to myself in 1996 and tell myself not to even put those songs on the first version and then I would go back to the present and add them to the deluxe edition, thus restoring the universe to its proper order. Or I could just make a playlist on iTunes with the songs I want. There are a few ways to handle this situation.

"I'm Staying Here and I'm Not Buying a Gun" This is one of the best song titles of all time. This is like a Morrissey song title, but with the benefit of not being a Morrissey song. (I like Morrissey, but the titles are usual the best part of his songs, which is why he usually repeats them 400 times during the song) This song also seems to be the one where JWH remembered that he'd hired a drummer for this album and lets him play. I really like that he keeps referring to someone as "Pilgrim" which I like to think is him doing a John Wayne impression, because I love when foreigners think everybody in American is a cowboy. Seriously. It's way cooler than how we really are.

"Late O' Clock"- This is the second half of the "Just Woke Up" song, and it benefits from having had about forty five minutes of music between the two halves. So you forgotten how catchy it was, but you've also forgotten how annoyingly catchy it was.

"Wooden Overcoat"- This was a hidden track on the original, and I never knew what it was called until it was properly released on the deluxe edition. Remember when artists put hidden songs on CDs? It was actually kind of a pain in the ass if you put on Nirvana's "Nevermind" and about six hours after the twelfth song finished the hidden song started to play. It would scare the shit out of you, if you, like me, used to put CDs on at night in the dark before you went to bed. Whose idea was it, the first hidden track on a CD, I wonder? Probably the same guy who came up with the packaging of CDs, with the impossible shrinkwrap and those stickers across the top that always leave a sticky residue on the case. Oh, who am I kidding? Nobody buys CDs anymore. I blame the decline in CD sales not just on the internet and music pirates, but on making CDs so difficult to open that Indiana Jones had an easier time getting the Ark of the Covenant. This song, by the way, is pretty good, and would've better a far better choice for the running order than "S,T,B&C", "Poor Heart" or "You Were Looking At Me."

The deluxe CD has two Bruce Springsteen covers, "Jackson Cage" and "Wreck on the Highway" (which is actually a duet with Bruce Springsteen) and I was surprised to learn that Bruce had asked JWH to open for him on his "Tom Joad" tour, which must be quite a thrill. In the original liner notes JWH thanked Bruce Springsteen,and I remember thinking that it must be another guy named Bruce Springsteen, seeing as how he also thanked Steve Martin who was his manager, and it wasn't the same guy as the guy from "The Jerk". I wonder if when Bruce asked JWH to tour with him, he was like "Hey, man, that 'Windowseat' song is tight. Make sure to play that one. You can skip some of those slow, weird ones." and then JWH was all like, "Sure thing, Pilgrim."

MY LIFE AS A PUNK

2009-06-12T12:19:00.001-04:00

Someday I will have children, and they will be as sweet and wonderful as can be. They will be studious, and kind, and thoughtful, and I will think to myself how fortunate I am to have such perfect children. Then, they will turn 12 and try to set me on fire. I know this because karma is real, and I have it coming.

I don’t remember the first time I tried to be bad. I know that as a child, I was bad--played too rough with my sisters, didn’t eat all my dinner but still wanted dessert, talked back to my parents. But I wasn’t trying to be bad. Being bad was what I became in the process of doing something or trying to attain something that I wanted. But sometime, around the age of 12, what I wanted was to be bad. That’s the difference.

I think it would be easy to blame it on bad influences, and Jesse, my best friend at the time, certainly fit the bill, since he wore a jean jacket vest sometimes with Guns N’ Roses pins on it. And having him around certainly made it easier to do bad things, because he either wanted to too or he didn’t need much in the way of excuse to misbehave. But it wasn’t his influence on me, or my influence on him. We were adolescents, all raging hormones and high pitched voices that cracked low without notice. We were full of that kind of weird sexual energy that has no realistic outlet except to create mischief. We weren’t malicious. It was just high spirits.

I don’t think I had it in me to use my mischief against those weaker than me, so I never was a bully. I might have helped that there weren’t a whole lot of people who were weaker than me, but I think there was a part of me that knew, somewhere unconscious, that I was only pretending to be bad. So I directed my malfeasance at those in power above me. My favorite was my 7th and 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Teahan. I tormented this woman on a daily basis for two years. I don’t know if I’ve ever showed such singular commitment again, to anything.

There are dozens of stories, all too similar and boring to really recount, but they all had a theme: she was stupid, and I was smart. And I reveled in any opportunity to demonstrate this to her and to my classmates.

An example: she once lost one of my three paragraph essays, claming that I had never turned it in. She told me that I could pass it in the next day but I would lose a whole letter grade for being late. I used to type everything on my typewriter back then, so that night I went home and typed the paper in triplicate, put different dates on each and hid two of them in different places on her desk, passing the third in to her. A few days later, she passed us back our composition folders, and inside were four of my essays, with an apologetic post-it note (well, series of post it notes--I remember mocking her decision to,once realizing that her thoughts wouldn’t fit on one or even three post-it notes, continue to write them on there anyway.)

My other foil was our 8th grade Social Studies teacher, Ms. Sullivan. Ms. Sullivan was in no way stupid--at least not to the extent that Mrs. Teahan was.) But her disadvantage was mobility: she was an extremely large and old woman, who rarely if ever got up from her desk during class. The only time, in fact, that she was not seated at her desk is during lunch. That it took us much less time to get back from the Cafetorium each day than it did for her to get back from the Teacher’s room (despite the fact that the teacher’s room was a great deal closer) allowed us to engage in much mischief. I don’t know when I first started turning things on her desk upside down--her stapler, her coffee mug, her desk calendar--but I do know that rarely a day went by when I didn’t find something to leave flipped upside down on her desk. Until one day, I had run out of things, and decided just to turn the whole desk upside down.

I had help. We cleared everything off the desk, to make sure that nothing got damaged, and then turned the entire desk upside down and took our seats. I won’t mention my accomplices by name, except Jesse, who has already been dragged into this, and Brad, who disappeared into private Catholic school the next year. Whether or not this descent into crime had anything to do with it, I am unsure.

Ms. Sullivan was an older teacher who looked like she had been teaching since the days of corporal punishment, and her face would get really tight and red when she was angry. She didn’t say anything, and asked some of the students in the front to turn her desk rightside up again. Nobody sold us out, but they really didn’t have to. Our reputation preceded us.

The next morning we came in to the classroom and our desks were turned upside down. Looking back now, I admire her pluck, but that day we weren’t going to be defeated, so we each sat on the desks upside, crouching on top of the wire book rack that hung under the seat. She ordered us to get off, and we eventually did, but we thought she’d learned her lesson. Don’t mess with us. She retired at the end of the year.

Probably my proudest moment as a punk was in Mrs. Teahan’s eighth grade class. As a class we walked down to the Elementary School and were paired up with a third grader, and the assignment was to write and illustrate a children’s book for them. Again, from the vantage point of adulthood, I can admire the civics lesson, the community service aspect inherent in this assignment. But as we left the Elementary School to walk the half mile back to the Middle School, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking that I wanted a Devil Dog. So instead of walking directly back to the school, I walked the opposite way to the center of town and in the local Lil’Peach, I bought a Suzy Q (there were no Devil Dogs on offer) and then walked back to the Middle School. Jesse came with me, at least part of the way, but I remember him being a little gun shy about actually going to the Lil’ Peach. No Suzy Q for him, then.

We were fortunate that Mrs.Teahan had gotten back to the school later, and was late for a grade wide assembly, so she marched the whole class into the Cafetorium, and as such we were able to sneak in undetected and nobody knew we had been missing. It was a dangerous gamble, and I don’t think I even knew about the assembly, or if I did, even imagined the possibility that I would be able to use it to cover for my tardiness. I didn’t have a plan to cover for my absence. Getting caught was probably the point.

The next day, however, the Elementary School principal called the Middle School to inform them that two eighth grade students loitered about before going back to the school. Jesse and I were hauled out into the hallway by Mrs. Teahan and read the riot act. I was a precocious child, and for some reason a big viewer of the daily repeats of LA Law on A&E, and made a lawyerly defense argument. How do you know it was us? Did the Elementary School principal mention us by name, or offer a description? Or did he say two boys and you automatically assumed it was us?

It was an impassioned plea, a well-argued defense, but I was careful to never actually say directly it wasn’t us. Instead I focused on the unfairness of being assumed guilty without evidence. Of being condemned by prior bad acts. And I could see it on her face. Mrs. Teahan realized the error of her ways. It was unfair to accuse us without proof. So she apologized. Said that she shouldn’t be so quick to rush to judgment and that she was sorry.

Jesse gave me a sideways look of relief. We had gotten away with it. We had escaped punishment for our silly little act of defiance, thanks to my deft skills of debate.

“It was us,” I said. I couldn’t resist letting her know that I had fooled her again. Even if it meant rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory. I couldn’t bear for her not to know that I had outsmarted her again. “You shouldn’t have assumed it was us, but it was.”

She retired a few years later and became our Massachusetts State Representative. I’d like to think maybe I’d taught her a few things that would come in handy during her political career.

I left 8th grade and when I got to the high school, I was the small fish in the big pond. There was little patience for my punkdom and nobody really found it funny anymore. The girls from my grade were all snatched up by upperclassmen boys and with nobody left to impress, my life as a punk was over, more or less.

Our final prank at the Middle School involved the Basketball scoreboard. It had been taken down for repairs, and was leaning outside Ms. Sullivan’s classroom, right next to the gym entrance. At the end of the day one day in late May or early June, Jesse and I picked the thing up and ran it down the long straight hallway, where the entire 7th & 8th grade classrooms were. Our plan, probably, was to get it outside and leave on the lawn. But when we got it to the lobby, we found it was too tall to make it through the doorway. Realizing we were seconds away from being caught, we rested it up against the wall there, and then left through the front lobby doors, to go cause our mischief somewhere out in the sunny spring air. There’s probably a metaphor somewhere in there, but damned if I could find it.

Moral Dilemma of the Day 6/10

2009-06-10T10:10:00.000-04:00

Let's pick a band/artist you love, and a band/artist you hate. For example, let's say that you love the Beatles but you hate Styx. And let's say that tomorrow morning you wake up in a parallel dimension where the two bands switch places, so that Tommy Shaw and Dennis DeYoung are the two most acclaimed songwriters in pop music history, having written such great hits as "Yesterday" and "Strawberry Fields Forever", and their band Styx is the biggest band of all time. Meanwhile, two young men from Liverpool, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, team up to form a band called the Beatles and released a concept album about robots taking over, featuring a song called "Mr. Roboto". Although the songs and the critical acclaim have switched (in other words, Styx has written all the Beatles hits and their albums are held in the same high regard that the Beatles are now) the individual personalities of each artist is intact: if you'd like, you can imagine a "Hard Day's Night" like movie starring John, Paul, George, and Ringo, except instead of having Beatles' songs on the soundtrack, it features "Babe" and "Snowblind." Nobody will remember that these two bands used to be reversed, only you. So the question: are you a Beatles fan or a Styx fan*?

(*Or Stones and Bon Jovi, or Radiohead and Jonas Brothers, et cetera)

Moral Dilemma of the Day

2009-06-09T12:40:00.000-04:00

You are in a happy relationship with a person of your preferred gender who you find attractive, and who you can envision spending the rest of your life with. You also have a beloved pet (cat, dog, turtle, whatever) that you've had since before your current relationship began, and who you love more than you've loved any pet you've ever had before.

And then one day you wake up to discover that your lover has turned into some kind of domesticated animal and your pet has become a person, an attractive person of your preferred gender. Their personalities will remain intact, so that your new cat (or dog) will have the same personality as your former lover, and your new lover will have the same personality as your former pet. The problem is that your new lover is violently allergic to your new pet, and one of them will have to go. Who do you choose? The person who before yesterday was your pet, or the pet who before yesterday was your lover?

Sample the first chapter "The While"

2009-06-05T15:26:00.000-04:00

My new book, "The While" is available now, using the links at right. It tells the story of eight-year old Matthew Giarrano and the last seven days of his life.

The first chapter can be read here

Moral Dilemma of the Day

2009-06-04T10:54:00.000-04:00

In 1696, Guillaume de l'Hôpital published "Analysis of the Infinitely Small to Understand Curved Lines" which included a mathematical discovery he called L'Hôpital's Rule. The problem? Guillame was a mediocre mathematician at best, and hired Johann Bernoulli to tutor him, in order for him to be able to devise a mathematical theorem. Eventually Guillame got tired of waiting for inspiration to strike, and purchased one of Johann's mathematically discoveries, and named it L'Hôpital's Rule after himself.

So here's your moral dilemma: if you invented something and someone offered to pay you an outrageously large sum of money for it, with the caveat that they would claim credit for the invention and that you would never be able to mention to anybody that you had anything to do with the invention, would you take the deal? Or would you keep credit for your invention, but remain at your current economic status forever?

EVERY SUPERBOY NEEDS HIS LEX LUTHOR

2009-06-02T13:15:00.000-04:00

I had a dream a few night ago where I was filling out an application, and somewhere after emergency contacts was a blank reserved for my archenemy. I remember being slightly concerned in the dream why the people reading this application wanted to know who my archenemy was, but I quickly became anxious at the question itself: who was my archenemy? I’ve certainly used the term before to describe a great number of people, from the head of the high school guidance department who was my last boss to the pretentious poet/artist I went to high school with sometime in the last century. But those weren’t archenemies. They were foils, rivals. To truly be an archenemy, by definition, they would’ve had to have been my best friend in the whole world. That’s what an archenemy is: someone you hate with the same passion that you used to love them with.

People who are only familiar with the films or cartoons or comics might not realize that Superman and Lex Luthor had a relationship prior to Metropolis. When they were boys, they both lived in Smallville, and there, Lil’ Lex and Lil’ Kal El were best friends. (It’s my understanding this is similar to their relationship on the Smallville TV series.) Lex even developed a cure for Kryptonite, such was his friendship with Superboy. But when Lex’s lab catches fire, and Superboy uses his super-breath to extinguish the flames, he destroys Lex’s experiment and knocks chemicals onto Lex’s head, causing the permanent baldness that has become Luthor’s trademark. Convinced that Superboy purposely tried to ruin the experiment and cause his baldness out of jealousy, Lex turns on his friend, and swears to get revenge. Cue 70 years of rivalry.

So who, under this criterion, would be my archenemy?

I grew up on Auburn Street in Whitman, Massachusetts, a busy little street in a decidedly unbusy little town. As a toddler, I was able to entertain myself for countless hours, running around my backyard, pretending wiffleball bats were swords, old ropes were tentacles, and tiny kittens were frightening manticores. It was an idyllic life, one that probably worried my parents, and while I would sometimes play with my cousin or the children of my parents’ friends when they came over, there were no children in the neighborhood for me to play with, nor did I have any desire to seek any out. They would have to come to me.

And when I was five years old, our next door neighbors moved out and the Joyce family moved in. They had two daughters, Jennifer and Katie, and I don’t remember the first time I met them, but I can say I had, we were in each other’s backyards every afternoon. Jennifer was my age, and Katie was my sister’s, so we each had gained a playmate in one move.

A popular cartoon and action figure when I was young was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in which a fey prince and his cowardly giant tiger would be magically transformed into the fur underpants wearing barbarian He-Man and Battle Cat (although why He-Man was never recognized as being Prince Adam, but the tiger needed to wear a mask to protect its identity is beyond me.) And while I certainly loved the traditional superheroes of Superman, Spiderman, and the Hulk, I had a pretty singular preoccupation with He-Man while play-acting in my backyard. And even then, as a small boy, I knew that I needed a nemesis to really complete the experience. Jennifer fit the bill perfectly.

Which is to say that she was another person, and was willing to play with me. There was nothing particularly villainous about her. She was pretty, as far as I was concerned, and she had a certain bit of sophistication, relatively speaking. Video does exist of us playing which more or less contradicts this, but I remember her speaking with a slight upper class British accent, not unlike Gregory from Yardale in the South Park movie. (“Come, Wendy, let’s frolick in the underbrush! I have a 4.0 grade point average!”) She probably set mold for all the other erudite but snooty women I would later become involved with. Joy, I am looking at you.

But despite this level of snootery and sophistication, she was willing to play Masters of the Universe with me. But she didn’t want to be Skeletor or Beast Man, or even Evil-Lyn. (I was not so concerned with gender issues that I felt she needed to play a female character; in fact, Evil-Lyn, the at that time sole evil female character, was probably seventh on my list of villains for Jennifer to portray.) Instead she wanted to be She-Ra, He-Man’s newly revealed super-powered cousin. Which left me with little choice but to play the villain.

I didn’t really mind. I was pretty good at it--I seemed to relish the opportunity to be fiendish and evil, which is the main reason why I don’t drink alcohol or take drugs. Because I believe somewhere deep inside of me is a Skeletor waiting to come out. You can witness this, if you want, because there exists video of me putting Jennifer in a headlock, sticking my plastic sword against her chest, and dragging her across my backyard, cackling maniacally. My girlfriend watched it and wanted to know who was filming this, and why they weren’t stopping me. “It was just playing,” I explained. “I wasn’t really trying to hurt her.”

A small stream separated our two backyards, and the friendship between my sister Sarah and I and the two Joyce sisters was so great that my father built a small little bridge across the water, so that we could pass between each other’s backyards freely. Looking back upon it now, there is something so powerful and resonant about thinking about that tiny bridge, and how easily we crossed it, time and again.

When I started school, my mother sent me over to the Joyce’s in the morning to wait for the school bus. They had a giant golden retriever which had no fear of me, nor a respect for my personal boundaries, and I can trace my general dislike of dogs to the overzealous affection of Sandy upon my tiny boy body. The Joyce girls were also fans of Nickelodeon, the children’s TV network, and watched it constantly. I was not familiar with the network--we might not have had cable at that point--but based on my experience watching it over the Joyces’, I would think of it as the “Lassie” channel. These two girls loved the “Lassie” show so much. I couldn’t stand it. It was in black ‘n white, it had ridiculous plots, and it starred a goddamn dog. I don’t think I could’ve thought of a more boring show if I tried. But I was raised to be polite, so each morning before school, I would sit down in the Joyces’ basement with Jennifer and Katie and watched a golden retriever rescue the residents of the dumbest town ever.

I mention this detail to highlight the fact that I spent every school morning, and every school afternoon at Jennifer’s house. Afterschool we would play out back, weather permitting, and when it was cold or rainy we would sit inside and watch “Lassie.” So, while I would befriend Andy Greenlaw in first grade until we got in a fight over his refusal to let me play with his Inspector Gadget doll, and Wyatt Dowling in second, and then Mike Finley in third grade, if I was to be honest, I would have to say that my best friend growing up was Jennifer Joyce. I spent every day with her, and even though it was a matter of convenience for my mother, to have me watched by the family next door while she was at work, the truth remains: I played with Jennifer Joyce and I liked it.

I even had my first sexual pangs (though I didn’t know what they were) in the Joyce’s backyard, dragging Jennifer like a caveman back to the giant rock that sat at the edge of their woods. I don’t remember exactly what we were playing, but I can remember the strange and foreign feeling of having a girl’s body so close to mine and realizing at some animalistic level that the two were different.

Where does the story go from here? In the summer of 1987, they dug up Auburn Street to put in town sewerage, and I remember the summer being a hot one, the air filled with rock dust and the sound and smell of jackhammers. For what seemed like a long period of time to an eight year old boy, there was a large pile of gravel in front of my house, and Jennifer and I, despite probably several warnings from our mothers, were playing on it.

I can remember climbing up the giant rock pile, and sliding down, and getting my hands dirty, and getting rocks in my shoes and emptying them out. I don’t remember what we were playing, or if there was even a structure to the play, or if it was simply just “Here’s a giant pile of rocks, let’s go!” All I remember is that as I was on the opposite side of the gravel hill, I heard Jennifer yell out “Ow!” She started to cry and was running home before I even was able to get around the pile to see what was going on.

And here is where I learned about female betrayal: about ten minutes later, my mother called out the kitchen window to me. I came inside and she shook her finger at me and told me that I was grounded, no comic books, no television. How could I have thrown rocks at poor little Jennifer Joyce?

Except I hadn’t. I hadn’t thrown a rock at anything, living or non-living, boy or girl. I hadn’t thrown anything at Jennifer Joyce, but here I was, sitting inside on a summer’s day, found guilty and sentenced before I even had a chance to understand the crime I was charged with. Mrs. Joyce had called my mother, told her Jennifer had come home crying because awful, mean Ryan had thrown rocks at her head. Bring in the firing squad.

I couldn’t comprehend why Jennifer would lie like that? Had something else caused the rocks to strike her, a passing car or an errant jackhammer? Why would she assume it was me? And if nothing had struck her--which eventually became my preferred theory, that she was making the whole thing up--why did she lie about it? Why did she want to ruin my life?

It might seem a bit melodramatic to say that an afternoon’s groundation led me to hold a lifelong grudge against the girl, but one has to remember that I was eight years old, and it was summer, and an afternoon without being able to play outside, or read comics, or watch TV might as have been a hundred years in solitary confinement. And one also has to remember, if one can, how much betrayal stings when you are a child. Before we have opportunity to get used to it. Before we come to expect it.

So that was it. The following fall, my sister was also going to school, and my mother needed to find a real babysitter for us, and we began getting dropped off with a woman on the other side of town, and I never went over the Joyces’ again.
They still came over on occasion, usually for birthday parties, and the sting of betrayal, sharp as rocks against my face, affected my memory, and I pretended that I had always hated Jennifer Joyce, and that I always would. We had never been friends, and any mention of our previous friendship would have been enough to send me into a fit of raging denial. It was a reaction akin to a scorned lover. I changed the locks, burned her picture. She never meant anything to me at all. Don’t ever say her name in front of me. She meant nothing at all.

My family had some fun with this idea, and I was teased a lot by my mother and stepfather about Jennifer Joyce. They enjoyed my violent reaction to any suggestion of a possible future romance between Jennifer and me. Don’t you understand? I would say. She’s my worst enemy.

The last night I slept in the house I grew up in before my family moved away, Jennifer and her sister spent the night. Their parents must’ve needed to go out of town for the night for some reason, and my mother offered to let them sleep over. They spent the entire time with my sisters, while I sat alone in my room, as sick as if they had brought kryptonite into the house. I couldn’t believe it. My own worst enemy, under my own roof! I moved the East Bridgewater a few days later, and although my father moved into the street on Auburn Street (meaning I would never be totally free from her) it wasn’t too long after that the bridge was damaged during a particularly heavy rain, and my father removed it so that nobody would be hurt trying to cross it.

It would be five years before I was able to get my revenge on Jennifer Joyce. We ended up both attending PCC, the summer academic program I proudly teach at today, in the summer of 1994, and she befriended Janine, one of the girls from my school. Janine came and talked to me, in that confidential way that barely teenaged girls have of confessing the love of others. Jennifer liked me, Janine told me. She thought I was cute. Maybe she had always liked me, I thought. Maybe that explained the whole thing.

I managed to avoid Jennifer the rest of the summer, and I met a girl of my own that managed to preoccupy me so that I forgot all about what Janine had told me. But that fall, at our Homecoming dance, Janine signed Jennifer in. Jennifer came up to talk to me, and I, in a measure of cruelty I can’t even pretend to defend, ran away comically, like Mike Meyers from Lara Flynn Boyle in Wayne’s World. I must’ve thought it was funny. I know I definitely thought it was fitting. Tell my mom I threw rocks at you, will you? Let me humiliate you in a crowded room full of strangers. I was still punishing a fifteen year old girl for a tiny little lie she had told when she was eight years old.

I have always thought of myself as Superboy in this particular situation. I was the one who was wronged by her jealousy, or her wickedness. I always wanted to be the hero. But when push came to shove, I was always willing to be the villain. And so while I have told the story many times about the girl next door who was my worst enemy, I have also held a grudge against her for something she did over twenty years ago, something so insignificantly small it ruined my summer for an afternoon and a friendship for a lifetime. I have always thought of myself as Superboy in this particular situation. Now I’m not so sure.

LISTENING PARTY: Transverse City

2009-05-29T11:45:00.000-04:00

I have never wanted an album like I wanted Warren Zevon’s “Transverse City”. I first became a Zevon fan the end of my sophomore year of high school when I picked up his then most recent album, “Mutineer.” In short order (well as short order as a 15 year with no money in the pre-internet days when people had to go to record stores and buy records with money instead of just stealing them off the web) I picked up “Mr. Bad Example”, “Sentimental Hygiene”, “Learning to Flinch”, and “A Quiet Normal Life” (the best-of collection of his 70s work.) I had read somewhere (and where did we learn things before the internet allowed us to just look up whatever we wanted? I think it was from one of the Rolling Stones Album Review Guides) that Zevon released an album between “Sentimental Hygiene” and “Mr. Bad Example.” I had never seen this CD at any of the record stores I frequented (although I feel like I made a lot of my CD purchases at places like “Circuit City” and “Lechmere’s” at the time) and when my friend Kris told me that she had tried to order the CD for my birthday and was told by our local record shop that the title was unavailable I learned a terrible, horrible phrase: Cut-out. I was never going to be able to find “Transverse City.”
It was about 10 months later (an eternity when you are 15-16) that I learned of a second phrase: Cut-out bin. And in this cardboard bin filled with cassette tapes with their spines sliced, I found a $2.99 copy of Warren Zevon’s “Transverse City.” It was at an old music store frequently found in malls called “The Wall” and I was with my friend Kris, who lent me the $3 I needed to pick up the tape, bringing the whole thing full circle. It is hardly the best Warren Zevon record, but it is my favorite. You can probably make an argument that it is not as warm sounding as the best of his 70s records, or that it lacks the punch of its predecessor, “Sentimental Hygiene.” And that it points the way towards the more simultaneously garish and cheap-sounding production of his 90s work. You may complain, like Zevon’s mother did, that there are no funny songs. But I rejoinder with three simple words:
CYBERPUNK. ROCK. OPERA.

“Transverse City”- I feel like Zevon has been listening to lots of Kraftwerk before recording this song. Or maybe that Taco guy. There’s something so German and Math-y about the way this song opens. Luckily he brought Jerry Garcia to play lead guitar on the track. That’s right, the leader of the Grateful Dead is playing on German Synth-Rock. Did they have to give Garcia a B-12 shot before he started playing? The lyrics sounds like they come from Blade Runner: The Opera. He keeps singing to some girl named Pollyanna, and if I were him I would’ve invited Haley Mills to appear in a music video where she dances around a bank of computer screens and slow dancing with robots. But maybe that’s why Virgin has never offered me a record contract.

“Run Straight Down”- I want to be a chemist so I can make what ever compound Zevon is naming under the music of this song. I bet whatever it is could eat through a safe door. Listen to the video clip. He sounds like he’s naming the ingredients in “Fruity Pebbles” after sugar and rice. Continuing the guest-guitarists-from big-bands theme he’s got going, Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd plays lead guitar on this track. At least Gilmour has experience playing guitar on inscrutable concept albums. I can totally see Gilmour just nodding as Zevon explained his idea. “It’s going to be a concept album about a dystopian future in which people are controlled by chemicals and consumerism.” Gilmour: “One of our albums had a pig singing through a vocoder.” Point: Pink Floyd.

“The Long Arm of The Law”- Zevon is great at dropping completely disarming details into his lyrics. The song just kind of details somebody who is a criminal, and most of the lyrics are pretty generic “When I was born, times were bad, when I got older, they got worse. First words I ever learned were ‘Nobody moves nobody gets hurt.’” But then he has one verse in the middle that talks about a war in Paraguay back in 1999. This album came out in 1989. He’s talking about the future! I love reading about futures that have already passed. Like how Logan’s Run took place in like 1992. “We’ll all be wearing shiny uniforms by then, and they’ll kill all the old people!” Guest star for this track: Jazz pianist Chick Corea, who doesn’t seem to do anything that worth bringing in a jazz great for. Maybe it’s part of Zevon’s theme: in the future, there will be jazz pianists, but they’ll only be able to play on MOR radio albums, way, way down in the mix.

“Turbulence”- This song is about a Russian secret agent. My favorite lines? “Well, I’ve been fighting the mujahaddin, Down in Afghanistan. Comrade Gorbachev, can I go back to Vladivostok, man?” I love that he refers to Gorbachev as “man.” If Zevon had had another verse where he had somebody say to Khrushchev “Bummer, dude” I think it would be the best song of all time. Also, I had to consult the lyric sheet for the spelling of Vladivostok, and there’s a verse that Zevon sings in Russian, and in the lyric book it says [there is Russian lettering here] [unable to re-type] [what should we do?] Guest star: JD Souther on harmony vocals. We’re a long way from the Hotel California, JD.

“They Moved the Moon”- I really like this song. It’s more of a mood piece. Jerry Garcia’s back on guitar for this one. I like to pretend that they just couldn’t get Garcia out of the studio. He just kept on hanging around. It sounds like he was just noodling around, and Zevon puts a bunch of post-processing on the guitar to make it sound like different things. Like outer-space machines. Or something. The song really is pretty awesome, although I like to pretend that the chorus is literal. Or like, if the guy in the song met up with a third grader. “They moved the moon, when I looked down. When I looked away, they moved the stars around.” “Yeah, mister. It’s called the Earth’s rotation.”

“Splendid Isolation”- This song doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the tracks. It’s also the only song that anybody who doesn’t own this album may have ever heard. It’s all about going off to live in the desert like Georgia O’Keefe. Or Michael Jackson in Disneyland. Best line ever: “Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand. And lead me to the world of self.” This song is really a classic. Bonus: harmony vocals by Neil Young, and a great harmonica solo by Warren Zevon. Although that may be a liner notes error, because I know how much Neil Young loves the harmonica. And because it doesn’t sound like the voice harmonizing with Zevon is that of a sick Canadian bobcat. God, how could I be so cruel to Neil Young? Now that I listen to it, the harmonica is most likely not Young, because it doesn’t do that thing that Neil Young harmonica solos do, where it sounds like he just thought that all you had to do to play the harmonica was breath in and out of it really hard. There are individual notes, Neil!

“Networking”-This song brings back the sound effects, where we open with the sounds of people eating lunch. This song utilizes a number of Heartbreakers, so it has a nice organ sound on it courtesy Benmont Tench. And apparently since Zevon had his own bass player, Howie Epstein gets to play the banjo. I think that’s buried way down in the mix. My fiancee loves this song, especially the chorus where Zevon tells you that you upload him and he’ll download you. She always sings along with that part. I love imagining that for many people back in 1989, those two words meant nothing. Oh, Warren, you were so ahead of your time. Open question: is upload/download supposed to be a sexual thing?

“Gridlock”- Alright, we’re never going to make it to the 1999 War in Paraguay if we can’t through this traffic! God, it sucks to think that in the future we’re still going to be sitting around , bumper-to-bumper. Where are our jetpacks and flying cars, Warren? I think Warren must’ve been kicking himself when he realized that by 1999 we eliminated the need to physically move ourselves around at all, able to teleport our minds and communicate telepathically. Man, Gorbachev, let’s just get out and walk. Neil Young on guitar, this time.

“Down at the Mall”- Wait. Americans are consumerist freaks? We like to buy stuff? Malls are really big? After you’re done recording this song, Warren, I have the broad side of a barn I need hit. Would you mind coming down? There are a few nice touches, like when he’s naming all the stores he’s going to go to, and there’s a second voice talking over the list, and it says that they’re going to stop to buy some oriental imports. I like that. Also, I like that he let Howie Epstein play bass, instead of giving him a banjo and telling him to sit in the corner and shut up. At this point I should probably point out that both Warren Zevon and Howie Epstein are dead, which makes me a very insensitive person.

“Nobody’s In Love This Year”- I love this song, and it’s one of the great Zevon love songs. I’m sorry, one of the great Zevon we’re-not-in-love songs. This might be my favorite song title of all time. Guest appearance by Mark Isham on flugelhorn. . Zevon was a great writer, if he wasn’t always a great performer of his own material. Case in point: the “orchestra-hit” keyboard line throughout the song. But the guy is all class, because he pronounces maturity as “ mah-tour-ity” as opposed to “match-err-ity.” He’s like Frasier.

(There is no live version of "Nobody's In Love This Year" I could find, so here is his great we're-not-in-love song from "Mr. Bad Example" instead. "Searching for A Heart")

This album was reissued on CD in 2002 to capitalize on…I’m sorry, commemorate Zevon’s passing. And as such they dug up probably the only bonus track they could find, a demo of “Networking” which frankly ruins my listening experience, because “NILTY” is such a great album closer, and they only include one bonus track? I’m listening to it, because I said I would, but it really cheeses me off.

The album cover is Zevon surrounded by a fractured background of cars and stores and other signs of the capitalistic black spot on the soul of America. I used to think his hair was deliberately styled to make him look like a mad scientist or like Renfield from Dracula, but looking at video performances from the time, this was apparently how Zevon wore his hair. Two years later he would show up with a beard, and I think I can say on behalf of people who look at faces everywhere, it couldn’t have come a moment too soon.

The Asymptomatic Athlete

2009-05-27T11:07:00.001-04:00

I played soccer for three years when I was in Elementary School. I played soccer for three years the same way someone could have hepatitis for three years and not know it. I was an asymptomatic athlete. I was only vaguely aware I was playing soccer, never understood the rules or the function of the sport, and spent the majority of the game standing at the 50-yard line completely still waiting for the ball to go out of bounds so I could throw it back in. My position was half-back, and I had no idea what that meant, and legitimately thought I was just supposed to stand in one spot for the entire time. During a soccer game. Standing still.

The next organizational sport I played was football when I was in fourth grade. There were some photos of me in my football outfit, the one it took my mother something like seventeen hours to get me into, but they have thankfully been lost to time. I went to one practice and quit. The bastards wanted me to run! How ridiculous.

And that’s it. The rest of my athletic career consists of pick-up games with friends, where I volunteered to be the kicker, or the goalie, or the equipment manager. Anything that meant I didn’t have to focus all my mental energy on the game. Anything that meant I could play without having to enjoy it.

Part of it might be a certain kind of athletic blindness I have. In the years I worked at a high school, I coached a number of teams, and found that I found myself focusing on one player at a time. It might be a back, or a forward, or a midfielder, or the third baseman, or the outfielder, or the pitcher. But I wasn’t ever able to ever really see the entire field of players at once, at least not in any way that allowed me to effectively understand every aspect of the game while it was happening.

But a bigger, more important part of it is that I’m just not athletic. True, I’m terribly out of shape these days, and there were period of my life when I was younger when I was similarly out of shape, but there have been periods of my life where I have been in relatively good shape and I was just an in-athletic at those points as I am now. I’m just no good at sports.

(Two exceptions: I can play a pretty mean volleyball. It was the only faculty vs. student sporting event I would participate in, and I would play pretty damn well. I even played in flip flops. The other exception is four square. Dear god, if there was professional four square I might have made it my career. I’m really hard to beat once I get into the fourth square.)

When I was in fourth and fifth grade, I played intramural basketball after school. It was just kids from my school, and we’d throw on pinnies and scrimmage in the gym. Our gym teacher, Ms. Ladouceur served as our coach, and at some point during the season, she benched me, which was probably for both our benefits. I didn’t really want to play and she didn’t really want to have to make me. And since it was right after school, my parents rarely if ever were able to attend any of these scrimmages, which probably made it that much easier for Ladouceur to bench me for the majority of the season. So three afternoons a week I spent an hour after school wearing a red pinnie and sitting on the sideline, thinking about what comics I was going to buy or imagine various ways we all might get trapped in our underground gymnasium and the various MacGyver-esque plans I would use to free us all. I’m sure that she must’ve put me in a little bit each game, but my prevailing memory was thankfully not playing any basketball.

My mother would ask me how basketball was going, and I would make up stories to cover for the fact that I wasn’t playing. In these stories, I tried to invent plausible scenarios, and tried to keep them within the parameters of my athletic ability. Soon, though, I decided that I would score a basket in my imaginary game, and my mother seemed impressed by this, and I slowly started scoring more baskets per game. A few times I even was able to score the winning basket. I don’t think I ever liked sports more than I did in the forty-five second recaps I provided my mother each day.

On the final day of basketball for the year, I was sitting on the bench, wearing my red pinnie, thinking about whether or not I liked Hawk and Dove comics (I hadn’t ever read any, but it was something I wondered about) and whether or not Erin Toomey was going to ever marry me. The afternoon was winding down, and Ms. Ladouceur must’ve decided that it was time for me to get into the game, and she told me to take John’s place. The kids on John’s team were pretty upset and groaned, because John was taller than the rest of us and was pretty good at basketball, and I so very clearly wasn’t, and intramural scrimmage or not, nobody wants to lose. Which they most certainly would, now that I was taking the place of their forward.

I couldn’t dribble, couldn’t pass, couldn’t shoot. I hadn’t even brought a change of clothes, and so while all the other kids were playing in shorts and t-shirts, I went out onto the court wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. I’m sure Ms. Ladouceur thought she was helping me out, but in truth she was ruining the afternoon, and probably the whole season for everybody. THAT was how bad I was. Most of the second half of the game in which I played was spent with my team passing the ball around me. I don’t think I even touched it once.

You know how this movie ends. My team was down by one point, the clock was ticking down. Ms. Ladouceur, maybe realizing that she had deprived me of a fun experience, maybe feeling guilty that she had cultivated an atmosphere that made it okay for an intramural basketball team to not pass the ball to one of their own teammates, yelled out, “Somebody pass it to Ryan!” And somebody did.

I didn’t want to actually have the ball, or have to dribble it, or think about who to pass it to, so I sent it up to the basket. It was bounced right off the backboard back into my hands, like it knew that the last thing I ever wanted was to touch it again. So I sent it back up to the hoop, and this time it went in. I’d like to pretend that it was a swish, or that it was one of those balls that circled round the rim a dozen times before dropping in, but it just bounced off the backboard into the basket. And we won. I’d won the game.

I was so excited I couldn’t even believe it. It was a good feeling. It was a great feeling. This must be why people play sports, I thought. So they could feel like this. I couldn’t wait to tell my mom.

Of course, from my mother’s perspective, I had already scored the winning basket. She seemed happy for me, but she wasn’t as excited as I wanted her to be. This was an old story to her, one that I had told her in other afternoons, and because I had already accomplished the feat of the winning basket--because I had lied to her--it robbed the experience of any of its magic for me. I never played an organized sport again.

Fifteen years later, in my first year working as a teacher, I was invited to one of my students’ graduation parties. I spent most of the afternoon sitting with my students, drinking orange soda and eating hot dogs, telling them funny stories about my own high school years, when the girl’s father called over to me. “C’mon, Ryan. Old guys vs. young guys.” He waved me over with a wiffleball bat. That’s when I realized, I’m one of the old guys. In fairness, the “Old Guys” also drafted a 15-year old to their team. So I think I was being put on the old guys team specifically because I was a young guy. They thought I was their ringer, because I was only 24. If only they knew.

I spent a lot of time while the Old Guys were up at bat looking at the slimness of the yellow bat, the smallness of the white ball. I tried to estimate their respective widths relative to the length of my body. Tried to figure what percentage of my body that tiny ball represented. I tried to imagine ways that the explanation “The ball is 5.7% of my entire body” could in anyway sound manly.

But when I got my first at-bat during the second inning, I tried not to look at the small crowd that had gathered and just thought if I stand here and let the pitches go by, I can strike out without swinging. There was something about that that seemed dignified, somehow.

But as I saw the ball approach, in a way that I can’t even imagine now, I felt the bat lift off my shoulder, I felt my biceps and triceps move and stretch themselves, and I hit that wiffleball, first swing. I can still remember the sound it made as it whizzed by my students heads, out into the woods. I heard men my father’s age cheer, whistle, yell out homerun, and as I took my leisurely jog around the makeshift bases, and heard the mothers and fathers and the students that had gathers applaud and cheer and shout “Way to go, Mr. T!” I made a note to take my time and savor the victory. It was, like all victories, fleeting. I’d have two more at bats, and I would strike out one, and foul out another. But as I jogged my way around third after having hit the first homerun in a pick-up game of wiffleball that had no consequence to anybody or anything, I thought, This is it. Hang my number from the rafters.

LISTENING PARTY: Under the Blood Red Sky

2009-05-21T14:06:00.000-04:00

LISTENING PARTY: Under the Blood Red Sky

I was exposed to most of the music I listened to growing up through my parents’ record collections. (Well, primarily my father’s, as my mother wasn’t exactly a music buff.) And my father, I like to imagine, grew up in some kind of South Shore version of Quadrophenia, where there was a clear line of demarcation with regards to popular music. Hence, growing up, I really had little knowledge of the music of the Beatles (except a charming and I’m sure now worth a fortune if I could find it copy of Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing the Beatles) because my father was a Stones fan. And while I grew up with an appreciation for the high pitched strained singing of Neil Young, there was no Bob Dylan in my house. In fact, looking back on it now, the first time I probably heard any Dylan (except maybe “Rainy Day Women” on the FM radio) was his vocal contributions to “The Traveling Wilburys” Volume I, one of my and my father’s favorite records in the late 80s. Dylan teamed up with Tom Petty, Roy Orbinson, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne from ELO. He had obviously come a long way from Greenwich Village.

So, suffice to say, I think I made my Dylan journey from a different starting point than many others, and while I have an appreciation for his early records--I own Bringing it All Back Home through John Wesley Harding--I find a lot more enjoyment in his later, weirder works. The only “classic” Dylan album that I really really love--it’s my favorite Dylan album and one of my top ten favorite albums of all time--is Blood on the Tracks. But even that is tainted by my spotty pop culture history. I picked it up at the end of my senior year of high school because the film Jerry Maguire featured “Shelter from the Storm” over its closing credits. Show me the shame, Jerry.

And I was so enamored with that record, I went to Tower records--truly dating myself here-- and scoured the Dylan bin for another masterpiece. And what I came up with was Under the Blood Red Sky. I don’t know why I chose this particular record, instead of Highway 61 Revisited, or Down in the Groove (on either end of the quality spectrum) but instead ended somewhere right in the middle. And Under the Blood Red Sky is pretty much in the middle. It followed Dylan’s “comeback” album (his , like, 50th by that point) Oh Mercy and was so trashed at the time of release that the fact that Dylan did not release any new original material for seven years was not exactly something that caused mourning among music listeners. But I love this record. A lot of it is nostalgia, but that’s why we love any record. Also, I love how much fun Bob Dylan seems to be having pissing everybody off.

“Wiggle Wiggle” I don’t even think I need to comment on this. Look at this title! “Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a swarm of bees/ wiggle on your hands and knees” This album was produced by Don Was, who was pretty famous as a producer in the late eighties early nineties for producing modern AOR (album oriented rock--code words for albums dads think are cool.) So it sounds a little like a Bonnie Raitt album, but some part of Dylan must’ve enjoyed that. Maybe he was hoping he'd run into her during recording and then he could put the wiggle-wiggle on her. Or something.

“Under the Blood Red Sky” Dylan is clearly just ripping off nursery rhymes for this one. “There was a little old man who lived in the moon, one day he came passing by.” And there’s something about a little girl getting a diamond as big as her shoe, as long as she continues to live under a blood red sky. Although I don’t know who would want a diamond that big because I’m guessing wearing it as a ring would break your finger. But don’t worry, she’s not going to get that diamond after all, because Dylan informs us that she and the little boy are getting baked into a pie. Is that something that happened a lot? Did deviants kidnap children and bake them into pastries? Could you imagine Chris Hanson from Dateline stinging those guys? “Is that cinnamon in your pocket? Are you telling me you came to see an underage girl with cinnamon in your pocket and you weren’t planning on turning her into some kind of turnover?”

“Unbelievable” This is one of those almost rockabilly numbers that is probably more fun to play than to listen to. Somebody’s having fun playing a B3 organ, and there’s somebody playing a piano that plays like one note every fourteen bars, and he sounds like he’s having a good time. Like if you were a musician and Bob Dylan wanted you to play on his record, what would you do? Would you be jazzed, and then show up and he says “Wndwnafjw;ioe;qnfmd;afni’” which then the producer would translate for you as “We’re going to play a number called ‘Unbelievable’.” And you’d be psyched, imagining the organ part of “Like A Rolling Stone” and then Dylan played this number. It’s like having your parents tell you that Christmas has come early this year, except the whole family just converted to Judaism.

“Born in Time” This is a really pretty song, and one that I’ve read was left over from the Oh, Mercy sessions, which might be why it sounds like Dylan actually wrote a song instead of just making one up on the spot. I also like the phrase “born in time” and the way Dylan uses it differently throughout the song. The drums do sound like they were recorded in outer space, though, which is unfortunate. And somebody is singing harmony vocals with Dylan, which seems as challenging as trying to put a brassiere on a jellyfish.

“TV Talking Song” Well that was nice while it lasted. This is Dylan just trying to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” except way, way, way shittier. I have to admit I’ve never listened to what Dylan was talking about before, and now that I am I wished that I haven’t. It’s some kind of story about Dylan being in London, which he helpfully explains is a town, which is good, because that’s the only time he deals with anything specific. There’s some kind of riot and the TV cameramen jump over Bobby D and so he goes home and watches it on TV. So I guess it’s some kind of commentary on the way television detaches us from events, except that Dylan seems detached from this song the whole time. He sings it the same way I answer my girlfriend’s questions when I’m watching TV. We’re both trying to tell you something, but oh, what’s that shiny thing over there.

“10,000 Men” I’m a big title guy, so when I buy an album I look at all the song titles and try and guess which ones I will like the best based on those titles. I did not have high hopes for “10,000 Men” and my guess was right. He does say that he has “10,000 women in his bed” and he makes it sound like it’s right this second, which means he should probably finish this song up and get back to them, because if they’re anything like the 10,000 women Bret Michaels has in his bed during “Rock of Love” somebody’s going to end up dead soon if Bobby D doesn’t get on top of it.

“2 X 2” I’m sure someone might have fun analyzing this, but while I didn’t like the title 10,000 Men, I was excited about 2 X 2. It’s not bad.

I guess a note here about the album’s cover, and Dylan record covers in general. Has there ever been a major artist who has released so many albums without any of them having really great covers? His two most recent, “Modern Times” and “Together Through Life” feature some nice black and white photography, but for almost every other Dylan album it’s a picture of him, shot seemingly by an instamatic camera. Like the album artwork was due two days earlier and he hasn’t gotten around to it, so he hands some lady passing by his disposable camera and asks her to take a snapshot like he was a tourist. Which I guess he kind of is. A tourist of Earth. This cover is him crouching in the dirt, looking like he lost a quarter.

“God Knows” This is another song that was written for the Oh, Mercy sessions and sounds like he spent more than forty seconds thinking about it. I’d love to hear the Oh Mercy version, because that album was produced by Daniel Lanois, who while occasionally overbearing, at least knows how to provide proper atmosphere. The lead guitarist on this album sounds like the one who plays in your dad’s cover band. The one that plays family parties and on the town common on the Fourth of July. I don’t know why Dylan decided that this version of the song was the one he wanted to release, but maybe he just needed the money. He does have 10,000 women back home to feed. This song fades out in the middle of a lyric. Who does that? Dylan doesn’t even get to finish his sentence. It’s like when an old guy accepts his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars and he gets to thank his wife and his (cue music-we’ve got a Debi Allen dance number to get to). Unacceptable.

“Handy Dandy” I’m guessing this song excited the band when they heard it. It does kind of sound like “Like A Rolling Stone” complete with prominent B3 organ. And the lyrics are absurd. I don’t know who this Handy Dandy is he’s talking about, but I guess it might be somewhat autobiographical, because you probably need to be a dandy to score 10,000 women, and you certainly need to be handy if you’re going to bed them all at the same time. This might be the best song on the record.

“Cat’s in the Well” Man this guy has got his hands full. He’s got a harem the size of a small town and now his cat is down in the well, and apparently his horse is going bumpety-bump. That sounds severe. This song is a lot of fun, too. It reminds me a lot of Dylan’s last couple of record where it seems like he gives his band a light little song template (here’s a boogie number, let’s do a rockabilly one) and let’s them have fun with it. Then he just makes shit up on top of it. I think if I’d written the lyrics to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” I’d kind of put my feet up a bit, too. There are more words in that song than there are in most Tom Clancy novels.

I’m sure I haven’t done a good job of selling you folks on this record. Which isn’t really my intent, I suppose. It is a listening party, and this just happens to be one of those parties that doesn’t work out so well, a kind of “Costume party in July” listening party. Only half of the people dressed up and nobody’s dancing to the music. So we’re all just going to stand around, holding our empty glasses and stare at each other until the record’s over.

What does it say about me that while I know intrinsically that “Blonde on Blonde” is a vastly superior record, given the choice I’d probably rather listen to this one? The one that I spent a forty minutes listening to intently in the attempt to talk about why I liked it.

Is this new wallpaper?

RJT Answers Readers' Questions!

2009-05-19T12:42:00.000-04:00

I’d like for this to be a regular feature here on the blog with the mostest, but unfortunately, I either have no readers, or I have readers who have no questions. Or worse, I could have readers with questions but are too afraid to ask them. Because I am so intimidating, what with that picture over there where my shirt is unbuttoned to an unseemly level, showcasing the wild mane that is my chest hair.

But never despair, dear reader! Since I have no reader questions of my own to answer, I will instead answer the questions posed by the readers of Shade, the Changing Man vol. 1, no 7, published in July of 1978!

John Dwyer of Sydney, Nova Scotia asks: “If Shade proves his innocence, will his comic still be published?”
RJT: Well, John, since thirty-one years has passed, you should already know the answer to this one. Steve Ditko, creator of Shade (as well as the Amazing Spiderman) enigmatically quit the book after issue 8, thus ending the series. I’m not sure if Shade ever proved his innocence, even though I’ve read STCM no. 8, mainly because nothing in this series made any sense. I hope that the last thirty years have been kind to you, and thanks for writing in. Oh, and you should take some of the money you saved not being able to buy Steve Ditko’s Shade, The Changing Man for the past thirty-one years, and put it towards a copy of my new novel, “The While”, available now!

Robert Aldridge of Ft. Lauderdale, FL., writes: “Why did Mellu despise Shade at first?”
RJT: Hey, Robert. How’s Ft. Lauderdale these days? I don’t mean to do the whole “reading-between-the-lines” psychoanalytical thing on you, but are you have lady problems of your own? Because, let’s be honest, it shouldn’t be any mystery why Mellu despises Shade at first. It’s called playing hard to get. I’m going to guess that your problem is that there is a certain special someone who, despite your best efforts, thinks you suck. It happens to the best of us. And since it’s been thirty-one years, I’m going to guess that you’re no longer quite as dapper as you once were, and you’re probably worried what this certain lady who wouldn’t give you the time of day in 1978 won’t find you attractive three decades later. And you’re probably also worrying what your current wife will think, what with you pining after a girl who, I think has been pretty solidly established, thought you were a creep. The solution? Buy both ladies copies of my new book, “The While”, as it will show them both that you are a sensitive man who values great literature.

Rex Arnold of Huntsville, AL has this query: “What are the full powers of the M-vest?”
RJT: I’m guessing mainly keeping people’s chests warm. That’s what most vests do. But really, they don’t do very much to warm you on the inside, when your soul feels cold and alone. Why not invest in your very own “soul vest” i.e. my new book “The While”? It’s guaranteed to make you feel warm inside in a way that a regular (say, denim) vest cannot.

"The While" now available at Amazon.com!

2009-05-14T18:35:00.000-04:00

Buy The While from Amazon.com

My new novel, "The While" is now available from amazon.com. More so than holding the finished book in my hand, seeing my name on Amazon.com made the whole process of publishing The While seem that much more real. (Unless that other Ryan Tressel who is the Athletic Director of High Point University writes one of those coaches' books...)

For those of you who have been waiting to purchase the book from Amazon, now's your chance. And since my book is eligible for Super Saving Free Shipping (on orders over $25) here are a few books that I would recommend purchasing along with my book if you would rather spend your money on two new books instead of one new book and shipping costs.

"Where I'm Calling From"- Raymond Carver. Carver is the master of the short story, and this collection, which assembles some of his best in one place, is the best place to start reading the work on this man, who taught me the benefit of writing sentences that are less than 400 words long.

"The New Kings of Non-Fiction"- Ira Glass. I'm a huge fan of Glass's radio program This American Life, and this Glass-selected collection of non-fiction articles captures the strange beauty of people sharing their stories just as well as the radio program does.

"The Giant's House" Elizabeth McCracken. It's been a decade since I read this book, but I can still remember how moved I was by this quiet tale of the giant and the woman who loved him.

"We3" Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.
I love comic books as much as anybody, and there is probably no better example of the power of the medium than this heartbreaking tale of Pirate, Tinker and Bandit's attempt to go home. For those of you who scoff at the phrase "graphic novel" I suggest you give this a chance.

"Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In"- David R. Surette. Dave is a friend of mine, so I hope he'll appreciate the plug here. But besides being one of the best book titles of all time, "Easy to Keep..." contains some truly great poetry, each more surprising and powerful than the last.

"God Bless You Eliot Rosewater"- Kurt Vonnegut. I think it is nearly impossible to underestimate the importance of Vonnegut on American fiction in the 20th century, but it sadly seems possible to underestimate this beautiful novel, one of his more straight forward. The eponymous hero's advice to the newborn babies in the local maternity ward-- "There's only one rule: goddamn it, you've got to be kind"--should be the motto on our currency. This is a terrific and underrated book.

You may decide to only purchase my novel or you might have another book you've been eying that you want to pair up with "The While" (or you may not want to order any books at all) but if you're looking for something to bump your Amazon tally up to that magic $25-free-shipping, give any one of these a try.

Thanks for stopping by.

LISTENING PARTY: Play

2009-05-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

Every band has that album, the one that usually comes in the middle of their career. The one that unless you were a huge fan of that band you’ve never heard, the one that gets none of its songs onto the two disc Ultimate Best Of Collection. I love those albums. And I love Squeeze. I love Squeeze as a band probably more than I love any other band, because while there are bands that I like more, that have done better work, there’s just something about Squeeze that makes me love them so much more. Maybe it’s the insanely gifted lyrics of Chris Difford, and the way singer/guitarist Glen Tilbrook marries them to some of the most perfectly constructed pop rock of all time. Maybe it’s because of their best song, “Up the Junction” and the way it tells a complete and compact story about a boy and girl falling in love, having a baby, then splitting up in about 2 and a half minutes, and how it doesn’t have a chorus. And when the record company told the band that the song was insanely catchy and would be a number one smash if they would only add a chorus, SQUEEZE STILL RELEASED THE SONG WITHOUT A CHORUS. There’s something about that that just gets to me.

And I love Squeeze albums, especially Play. They had already broken up and gotten back together at this point, and were coming off of their biggest American albums Babylon and On (with its huge hit “Hourglass”) and Frank, and moved from the smaller label A&M to Warner Brothers. They recorded Play, and were dropped by Warner Brothers like thirty-five minutes after it was released. So it just kind of exists in the cut-out bin vaccuum. It gets no love on compilations (which Squeeze has an inordinate amount of) and if generally forgotten about. Three years later they would resign with A&M and release Some Fantastic Place, another great record that was considered their “come-back.” Oh, world. Squeeze hadn’t gone away. You fools just weren’t listening.

“Satisfied”- Chris Difford writes lyrics about the strangest things. This song is about laying around after having sex. The best part of the song is that for a song called “Satisfied” the song is so unsatisfying. The verses chug along, building towards a chorus that, tonally, goes down when you think it would go up. I’m sure someone with more music theory understanding than myself could explain it better, but the song builds you up for an exciting chorus, and then lets you down. And I’m 100% Squeeze does this on purpose. Because the lyrics are ironic. “They looked at each other, they looked at the night. Under the covers they were satisfied.” Doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for sexual fulfillment, does it? This song also goes on much longer than most Squeeze songs usually do. I think that’s intentional, too.

“Crying in My Sleep”- This album was produced by Tony Berg, and it certainly makes it sound unlike any other Squeeze album, but dear God Jesus does he put the bass way up into the mix. It feels like it’s punching you in the throat. Squeeze has had like 400 different bass players, and Keith Wilkinson, who plays on this album (and all the great later Squeeze records) is definitely the best. But I’m now halfway through “Crying in my Sleep” and all I can talk about is the bass playing. Difford writes about weak men better than almost anybody, and not in the desperate loser way that a lot of great songwriters do (Randy Newman, Freedy Johnston, Joe Henry) but in a really kind of pathetic way, like a song about crying in your sleep. I imagine the guy singing the song to be sitting in those pajamas that older men wear, where it looks like they just came from some kind of flannel prom.

“Letting Go”- The album starts to drift away from what a regular Squeeze album sounds like here. There’s some great organ and chamberlain work on this track, which is I think by Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello’s regular keyboard player. Squeeze was without a keyboard player because Jules Holland got a job hosting a late night talk show on the BBC. That would never happen in America. That would be like hiring the rhythm guitarist of Creed to take over the Tonight Show.

“The Day I Get Home”- Squeeze is basically two guys: Chris Difford and Glen Tilbrook. Difford writes all the lyrics, drops them in Tilbrook’s mailslot, and then Tilbrook writes the song. Glen is also the lead singer and the lead guitar player. Difford actually didn’t really do much musically, occasionally adding low harmonies, and strumming an acoustic rhythm guitar that when I saw them play was so low in the mix that I wondered if it was even plugged in. So it should come as no surprise that Difford hates touring, since his real role in the band is as a songwriter instead of a touring musician, and it should comes as no surprise that he would write a song about it. My favorite thing about this track? The backing vocals are by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer, otherwise known as Spinal Tap. See? This is why I love Squeeze. They get their first big recording contract with a big budget and they hire g-d Spinal Tap to sing background vocals. If I ever get a big recording contract I’m going to hire Sarah Michelle Gellar to play spoons on one track, just because I can.

“The Truth”- This is the first truly brilliant song on this record. The chorus of this song is “The truth has to be told, my blood runs hot and cold. The truth is not my middle name.” It’s hard not to just quote the lyrics to all these songs because so many of them are so odd and unexpected. Difford should be the poet laureate of rock music. You know how a lot of songs you like do the thing where the lyrics don’t make sense, or the singer has to rush through a bunch of syllables so that he can get to the end of the rhyme, or there’s just one line that completely inverts conventional English grammar so they can make the lines rhyme, even if the singer sounds like Yoda when he’s doing it? Tilbrook never has to do any of those things because Difford’s lyrics scan perfectly.

“House of Love”-The lyrics to this song are even better than the last one. “her eyes were stale and spun, like marbles left in the sun.” This song does suffer a little bit as some Squeeze songs do, with Tilbrook deciding that he needs to play a guitar solo. I’ve never met Squeeze, but I imagine always that there’s a really cute girl around all the time, and whenever Difford writes a really brilliant lyric, the girl kind of winks at him, and then Tilbrook hits his pedal and starts playing an incredible solo. Just to show him up. Other than that, this song is pretty amazing.

“Cupid’s Toy”- This was the first song I loved off this album. It’s about a slick guy in a club trying to score. The chorus is “This boy doesn’t get love, this boy doesn’t get love” and the reason it’s repeated twice is because it has a double meaning. He doesn’t get (doesn’t understand) love, so he doesn’t get (striking out with the ladies) love. Brilliant. If I were single, I would memorize all the disses in this song and go to a club and use them on all the lame guys there and the ladies would think I was so clever and suave, I’d have to send Chris Difford a check to pay him back for all the ass I’d get. Maybe. I think I’d probably still have to be more attractive to pull it off. But damn if they don’t tear this guy apart in this song.

“Gone to the Dogs”- a song about a guy at the dog track. It’s a great little story, but I wish I knew whose idea it was to put effects on the guitars to make them sound like dog barks, because I need to know where to send my letter of complaint. Especially since they sound more like elephants in heat. Tilbrook just sang about trying to ply someone with German wine. I’m no wine connoisseur, but does Germany even make good wine? It doesn’t strike me as their specialty, so it’s one of those little details that tells so much. What kind of guy drinks German wine? Nobody I’d like to know, that’s for sure. And sure enough, right after Difford brilliant line about the German wine, Tilbrook comes in with a guitar solo. I might be reading too much into this rivalry, but oh dear god, he’s making his guitar solo sound like a dog on the fade! Why can’t you two guys just get along??!!

“Walk A Straight Line”- That last song was a bit rough, and it feels like the boys know it and grace us with this beautiful little number. Some nice acoustic guitars and accordions. I’d like to take a second to highlight the great drumming on this record. This song consists of the drummer hitting the bass drum on quarter notes and every so often hitting a tambourine. I love restraint like that. Especially since restraint has rarely been Squeeze’s calling card. This song is just lovely all around. I think it’s about getting pulled over while drunk driving. Seriously. That’s the way these guys roll.

“Sunday Street”- There is no reason on Earth this song wasn’t a monster hit back in 1990. It’s definitely their catchiest number since “Pulling Mussels From A Shell” which most of you would recognize if you heard it even if the title doesn’t sound familiar. It’s such a great rocking number you might think they’d skimp on the lyrics but it contains the lines ‘a sarsaparilla drink turns white teeth shades of pink.’ That’s one of those details that you’d think was well-spotted if you read it in a novel, and it’s in a pop song that’s about four minutes long. The chorus mines the same territory that the Cure would later use in “Friday I’m in Love”, going through the days of the week, but the great bit is how it talks about how each of the days of the week kind of suck, but when it gets to the weekend, it’s “and then Friday and Saturday night, we get happy till Sunday’s through!” Do you see how he runs Friday and Saturday together that way? Have I mentioned that Difford was battling alcoholism all throughout the nineties? Do you get it know? I wouldn’t be surprised if the original lyrics were “we get shitted till Sunday’s through.” It’s a great pop song about going on benders. It also talks about playing on a trivia team. “How long is the river Thames? It’s where the evening ends.” I love that detail because it indicates to me that a) they play on the trivia team but aren’t any good and b) there’s a lot of liquid in the River Thames. It’s a crime that this song never became very popular. I imagine that this is what a lot of people’s weekends are like. Mine? I sit around and listen to Squeeze albums. It’s called living vicariously.

“Wicked and Cruel”- The bass part of this sound is way up in the mix, like the sound engineer accidentally feel asleep and his forehead pushed the mixer on the bass part all the way up. This song is another great acoustic number and has the best lyrics on the album. It’s about wanting to die and come back as a variety of different insects so you can watch what your girlfriend does after you die. “When I die I’ll return as a housefly, and parade upon her wall. So I can see who she’ll end up with, if that’s anyone at all. Did I say that? How could anyone be so wicked and cruel?” I love that the chorus “how could anyone be so wicked and cruel?” he’s talking about himself. If you’re so concerned about it, you could stop, right? No. “When I come back I’ll return as a spider, because she hates them so much.” What a dick. Although now he’s worried that she’ll wash him down the sink plug hole. You should be. You’re being a jerk. Better make it up to her. “She likes to kick like a mule.” No good, Difford. “If I came back as her, would I love me?” Probably not. “She likes to think I’m a fool, two fools in love.” Better, but you should’ve quit when you admitted you were a fool. No need to rope her in with you. This song is nearly perfect. Except for the drum part at the end.

“There is a Voice”- Another really nice acoustic number. “There is a voice inside us all that says destruct.”
Reading the book these two guys wrote, it’s pretty clear now that Difford was having a pretty terrible time in his life, and the lyric to this song reflects that. The chorus is “each day is a night” repeated over and over again. Talk about a nihilistic attitude. But I love how brilliant minimalist that phrase is, and how powerful it is, especially when you hear Difford’s voice finally repeating it over and over again, while Tilbrook does that wailing thing. It’s a pretty downer ending for the album, but looking back over the whole thing, that seems to fit. That’s what makes the album so great, is how the upbeat music is paired up with really dark lyrics. They’re hardly the first people to do that, but they’re among the best at it.

This album is pretty stellar, but ridiculously rare. In fact, while talking to you about it, I felt like those guys who claim they see a yeti, and they can’t prove it because nobody else has seen it. You’ve all heard “Tempted” and some of you might have heard “Black Coffee in Bed” or “Cool for Cats” but those songs are like squirrels, and this album is like the Loch Ness Monster. Most of you will never hear it or see it, and that’s a shame. But it seems like the guys from Squeeze almost expected it. Do you know how I can tell? Because they’re all sitting in a giant flowerpot.