song 167 : My Bad (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

This fragment is the first recording of Ronnie and me playing together. We had just begun playing guitar a couple months before so our timing sucked, but I like the way it sounds like some kind of forgotten recording from the days of the Delta Blues, a couple of drunk sharecroppers learning to strum.

I include it because it is the only remaining baby picture of Lucid Nation and you can see how deeply the blues had us under its spell. I said “my bad’ when I made a mistake so even though I didn’t want to sing at all I was the first vocalist for Cat Cult! The band is mine! Mine I tell you! My unconscious was all set to go go go but it would take riot grrrl to kick open the door.

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song 166 : Fox On Ice (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

This is Ronnie’s first and by far most primitive experiment with multi-track recording and effects.

At first, it seems by fox Ronnie means foxy like the rock stars of yore he mentions but really this title is lifted from the I Ching. Ronnie’s a big Lee Scratch Perry fan as mentioned and I think you can hear a bit of that in this mix. He plays the big solo near the end; I do the meandering bluesy slide licks the rest of the song.

There are two kinds of rock and roll: entertainment and enlightenment. Sometimes an artist is both. Any real rock fan is wondering, along with me, what happened to rock as enlightenment? The electric troubadour poets who crystallized and galvanized generations, we haven’t had a real one of those in a long ass time.

In this song I think Ronnie captures one reason for that. He sings about Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Jim Morrison, three of the most devoted rock as enlightenment poets. Their deaths resonate with an isolation and resentment that would make any sensitive artist think twice about following the trail they blazed.

I’m sure Kurt Cobain would have had a verse in this song but he was still alive when it was written.

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song 165 : Ways Across (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

I wrote the music for Ronnie’s lyrics about patience overcoming violence at a time when AC/DC and Muddy Waters were all I would listen to.

“Backed into a corner of mirrors
You got only yourself to blame
Change is original sin
When you play the sacrifice game
Sometimes you find it even in your family
Like being at the mercy of Nazi charity

“Baby, ain’t no need for suicide or murder
there’s always a way across
if you walk a little further
you gotta walk a little further
you will find ways across.”

You’ll notice that Ronnie at the time had a bad case of baby-itis. Almost every song gets at least one “baby”. It reminds me of a story I was told about the guy who sang for horrible hit band Foreigner. He had “hey-itis”. He had to sing “hey” at least twice in every song, and sometimes he’d add a “hey” after every line. Finally the producer said one more “hey” and you’re fired. That was the cure. Ronnie required nothing so drastic.

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song 164 : Wounded Knee (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like:

I have an ancestor who was a chief on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Because of the fate of so many of his family at the hands of the Nazis, Ronnie has strong feelings about the genocides suffered by Native Americans and slaves.

Check out Ronnie’s way with lyrics:
“Devil headed people came over on a boat
They had a disease that made ‘em want to choke
The life out of everything beautiful, wild and free,
Inside those pilgrim eyes were highways of concrete.”

“Don’t it make you wish poor Bob had possession over Judgment Day” is a nod to his obsession at the time with all things Robert Johnson.

But what I want to know is how did a first generation American immigrant kid become such a total redneck (as proven by this drawly bluesy rasp of a vocal that sounds like it was lifted off a 78)?

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song 163 : You Got Soul (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

I wrote the music for this song, Ronnie wrote the vocals. I could never sing anything like:

“You come knockin at my bedroom door
like some kind of guilty conspirator
lke a spy in the night
like an angel on the sly
like the southern sun
in the morning sky
talk to me all night about your boyfriend
follow me home into my bed

Tell me all and everything you’ve seen
You’re first love and last dream
Tell me your secrets with a kiss
Use the talk of fingertips.”

I think those are lyrics are beautiful but I would never sing anything so blatantly romantic, and neither would Bon Scott or Ronnie van Zandt, so I’m okay about it.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 162 : What You Do (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

That glitch at the beginning shows how close we came to recording over this song!

Way too silly and romantic for Tamra to ever sing, but cute, in a Marc Bolan with a dash of silly Lennon kinda way.

I love the bluesy interplay of our guitars. I guess our instincts were good because we had no clue and a lot to learn! We were convinced we could not be good because we had not been playing long enough. Columbia Records’ interest in us was like some kind of strange cosmic joke. Instead of ambitiously exploiting it, we were waiting for the punch line.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 161 : Pretending it’s Yesterday (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Ronnie’s rhythm guitar part later became the Lucid Nation song L.A. River that Keith Richards called marvelous. I played a sweet bass line on that, but I like this song just as much.

They say L.A. is a city
In a nightmare that never sleeps
Show me a town where pity
Outweighs the law of the street

The twentieth century,
Baby, it’s history
Time can’t turn back
To how things used to be

Do I sound a little paranoid?
I had a nightmare for breakfast today.
I saw a hundred million people
Pretending it’s yesterday.

It’s like Woodstock never happened
It’s like Ike never died
It’s like Elvis never shook it
It’s like Nixon never lied.

That song is over ten years old but it makes even more sense today. I may have to do a version of it with Lucid Nation I like it so much.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 160 : Last Round Up (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Yes, that is me snickering. This song is a lament for musicians lost when one night stands became pregnancies unplanned. It would make a great condom commercial.

On a more serious note I think the cruelty of women who saddle men with unwanted children, often for gain, can be a crime like rape: they forever change someone’s life against their will when they force a man to be a father. Of course, he was too stupid to take precautions so maybe nature elected him for the honor of parenthood.

Insert joke about how there wouldn’t be a human race if women stopped trapping men with children.

Tamra, you are slandering the very force of civilization, the bit and reins most trustworthy can only be fitted against the wild animal’s will. Men, like horses, must be broken. Besides, it is the oldest profession.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 159 : Nowhere To Hide (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

As timely as today’s headlines! Things have only gotten worse since this song was written.
“How do you deal with hopelessness?
How do you deal with helplessness?
How do you deal with crisis
When it’s world wide
And there’s nowhere to hide.”
I’m not sure how we accomplished this weird mélange of Woody Guthrie and AC/DC, no one could have planned it, it reads like it shouldn’t work, and yet somehow it does.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 158 : Hollywood Boulevard (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Now we are moving back through time to the very cassette tape that got Columbia Records interested in Cat Cult. These recordings were made inside an apartment living room, the two of us playing cheap guitars through practice combos, on a hand held cassette recorder. Talk about no overdubs or effects!

I wrote the music, Ronnie wrote the lyrics and he plays lead. It reappears on the Cat Cult Columbia multitrack demo as Boulevard in my Backyard with different lyrics and a much boppier feel only partly due to all the extra instrumentation. The music reappears again as the song Angry Pelicans on Lucid Nation’s “The Stillness of Over” CD with new lyrics and vocal by Debbie Haliday, and Ronnie on bass.

Hollywood Boulevard used to be mostly junkies and hookers, in a way it still is, they’ve just been pushed onto the side streets. On the boulevard itself you see mostly tourists these days. Since Disney started spending big bucks there the area is becoming gentrified. Some of it’s cool, like having the Knitting Factory there. The movie theaters are glitzy.

The famous Capitol Records building, meant to look like a stack of vinyl discs, is being turned into condos, and I have to admit if I was looking for a condo I’d really have to consider the building so many legendary bands recorded in.

The neighbors loved that part near the end of this track where we cranked up a sound effects record air raid siren.

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song 157 : It's Like Something (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

This was Ronnie’s recording swansong with Cat Cult. The something struggling to be born he’s howling about is probably Lucid Nation!

Man he finds a weird groove in here, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and I’m happy to say it owes a lot to my brooding bass line.

Riot grrrl found us on the rebound from Columbia, and every word in every zine could not have made more sense. Ronnie and I were about to become very different people as riot grrrl forced us to see ourselves and the world for real.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 156 : Powa for Santa Vicca (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Conrad Santa Vicca was best known as Divine’s dresser. When he was diagnosed with AIDS he decided to fulfill his dream of becoming a painter. His work was extraordinary, as the art world quickly recognized.

Ronnie and I met Conrad at a Holly Woodlawn party in a Silverlake backyard. The three of us talked about life and death under a huge old pepper tree. The stars were bright and the summer night was warm. We knew Conrad was dying. His healthy looking tan was the result of drugs they were giving him.

When he lit up a joint and offered to pass it to us I didn’t hesitate. My older brother was gay and I knew you couldn’t get AIDS from a passed cigarette. I also knew what it would mean to Conrad at that point in his life to have a smart ass white girl share a smoke with him without a flinch.

Ronnie threw me a horrified look but, slump shouldered and secretly pissed off, he took a puff, too. Conrad appreciated what we had done and the conversation we had then about his race with time to create all the art pouring into his mind was a life changer for us.

Conrad worked as many hours as he could every day to bring as many paintings to life as he could while there was still time. That was a guru moment for us. Parts of that conversation are in the lyrics of this song.

When faced with the descent into a painful death Conrad took his own life.
When we heard it Ronnie wrote this. A Powa is a Tibetan meditation or prayer that’s supposed to reacquaint the confused soul of the recently disentangled with the infinite consciousness and compassion that is our true home.

“He walks into the bright
Collision of every candy bar
Kisses and favorite TV shows
Sunshine on electric signs
Everything he wants to know.”

Some of the other lyrics reappeared in the Lucid Nation song L.A. River.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 155 : Walking Away From the Angels (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Ronnie recorded the sound of the ice cream truck right outside the apartment window to suggest the loss of innocence when you move away from home.

He was thinking of a Catholic girl we knew, who because her family would not accept her, had to leave home and church and fend for herself in a world she wasn’t prepared for.

Again check out the raw and bizarre, trance inducing mix. More EQ and reverb magic, another tribute to the genius of Lee Perry.

I like the old school vibe of this song, but Ronnie said it was corny and declared he’d never write a song on keyboards again. So far he hasn’t but I he’s been playing more keyboards lately so you never know!

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 154 : Under the Sea of Stars (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Debbie said she’s probably crazy
Because all she can think about
Are the identical refrigerators
In every claustrophobic house.”

I guess in a way you could say those are Debbie’s first lyrics for Lucid Nation, since Ronnie is repeating something she told him when we all were first becoming friends, just before she began drumming and zine writing.

What sounds like an anvil being smacked with a hammer is actually finger cymbals Ronnie used effects on.

Lyrics from this song wound up in the Lucid Nation songs Them (American Stonehenge, Public Domain) and Bleed (DNA, Public Domain).

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song 153 : Trip (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Ronnie painstakingly memorized this bit of Celtic open tuned picking that makes up the intro of the earliest version of the Lucid Nation song Trip.

As the lyrics in this version make obvious, Andy Wood of Mother Love Bone had recently died. We liked Mother Love Bone.

The lead playing in this song shows how quickly Ronnie’s skills developed when he was encouraged by interest from Columbia.

But my favorite thing about it is the way he mixed using reverbs and EQs to create a unique mood; again, a benefit perhaps of his being a Lee Scratch Perry fan.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 152 : Boulevard in My Backyard (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Hollywood Boulevard was one of the songs Columbia picked out so Ronnie revamped it into this new song with a completely different loose and funky feel. Check out The Doors-y keyboard part he threw in.

I like the lines:
“We tore down the jungle to put a street up
keep making it wider and longer
so we can drive and never stop
chicken hawks and stone faced cops
tail lights streaming red
pizza after midnight
see where Caesar bled.

“Some walk through like angels
Untouched and unafraid
Past shopping cart apartments
And pavement beds like graves
Everybody’s got a mission, a scam or a crusade
Some it seems never leave like ghosts that slowly fade

I wrote the lines:
“stuck on a fault in here
under fire out there”
and later used them for the Lucid Nation song Landmark (The Stillness of Over, Public Domain).

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 151 : New World Order (Cat Cult: The Origins of Lucid Nation)

Ronnie took to multi-track recording like a duck to water. I fell in love with playing bass. The results were a startling leap forward from the hand held cassette demos Columbia liked that you’ll hear later this episode.

Ronnie was goth once and you can hear the influence of bands like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy and Angels in Aspic in this moody song. The lyrics sound like they were written about today, huh?

Insect breath, the sweet smell of soil. That’s actually true!

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song 150 : FUBAR (Public Domain - The Best of Lucid Nation)

FUBAR is U.S. Army circa WW2 slang for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

“The more things you treat like it
the more your life turns to shit.”

When Jody heard those lines she wanted to chant them with me. I have to admit it felt surreal to stand there recording with her. We’d played gigs together, Lucid Nation’s second gig was opening for Team Dresch at an art gallery in downtown L.A., but she and Donna, like Kathleen, and Adrienne from Spitboy, were heroes to me.

Team Dresch is on top of the list of the best bands I’ve seen live (in a tie with a Sonic Youth sound check I saw at the Hollywood Palladium). I’m stoked that Jody played on FUBAR.

FUBAR was recorded on an ancient Soundcraft Series 3 sixteen track mixing board big as a boat. Supposedly it had belonged long ago to Heart, and more recently to Soundgarden. This song and Mung Jung Bushi were the only recordings I got out of the huge thing before it broke down completely. Only one repair guy in all southern California could work on it and he was in demand. So bye bye board.

I think I should have done more recording with this line up. I don’t know why I didn’t try to make that happen. Denise was busy with her Venice California metal band Form of, and Jody was playing with Family Outing, but we still could have gotten together once in awhile. Maybe we still will.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 149 : Before the Future (Mung Jung Bushi)

Late into the night we talked about the future. The audience hasn’t yet learned that the great art of the future will be DIY and hard to find, not corporate and handed to passive consumers everywhere on a silver platter. Remember, average people didn’t know who Beethoven or Van Gogh were during their lifetimes.

Here in Hollywood the movie, TV and music corporations, most of which are divisible into five giant octopus corporations, are scared shitless by the changes technology is bringing.

What happens when there’s no more forced programming? Instead of having to wait till 8 PM to see the show you want to see (and if you don’t have Tivo and you miss it well you’re screwed) someday soon you’ll search for the show on a search engine just like you search for music files.

Instead of a few commercial stations and a couple hundred cable stations we’ll have millions of directories and blogs, and huge databases just waiting to be enjoyed by explorers in pajamas.

Make no mistake, great artists of the future will use the most direct means for their self expression. With a good DV cam and Pro-tools and a website as their outlet they will reach millions. Maybe someday some of them will even make millions, too!

EPISODE 7 THE END
NEXT (mini) EPISODE Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 148 : Carbon Monoxide (Mung Jung Bushi)

On the subject of malfunctioning vintage gear that makes people go misty eyed, Ronnie drove Mecca Normal to their gig at Spaceland in a broken down silvertop 1966 Pontiac GTO coupe.

Because the trunk was rust eaten it filled with exhaust which spilled into the backseat till the passengers were dizzy. But the beautiful heap hauled ass on the freeway when Ronnie demonstrated what it could do. It had the California license plate Artcore.

Eight cylinder guilt, it haunts me, that thrill I get from the rev and torque of a big block engine. I love a car that jumps up when you shift it into second. I am an American, damn it, and I like that. I’m so ashamed, but Delorean was inspired when he designed this biosphere killing machine.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 147 : After The Past (Mung Jung Bushi)

We talked late into the night about the changes we were seeing. While having nowhere near the illustrious career of a Mecca Normal, Lucid Nation has been around long enough to see the bottom drop out of the music scene (and to bitch a blue streak about it). When we started out riot grrrl was already beginning to decline but was so huge to us it seemed to be only getting started. I was always pissed when I’d hear Kathleen or some other riot grrrl authority warn that the glory days were quickly passing. Boy howdy, were they right!

Don’t get me wrong. The scene wasn’t that great. There was lots of high school politics and back stabbing, the bands were mostly shits to each other, half the clubs were run by perverts, and the clubs were usually in parts of town where police laughed at you for being there. But there were plenty of great bands and fans anyway.

It’s strange that it wasn’t the Internet and the disinterest of a new generation that wrecked the scene. A rebirth of conservatism inspired fire marshals and councilmen to dig up reasons why kids couldn’t get together.

The Internet arrived like the dawn of a new day. We all knew the day the Internet came to town everything before it became the distant past. Mecca Normal continues to trail blaze. DIY video received mass media certification when MTV2 accepted for broadcast Jean’s haunting video for the Mecca Normal song “Attraction.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 146 : Spaced Land (Mung Jung Bushi)

The other show we played with Mecca Normal was at Soapbox at Koo’s new location, with Family Outing, Jody Bleyle’s band with her brother. It happened to be the night of Morrissey’s comeback tour hitting town so nobody showed up for our show. To Jean it didn’t matter how many people were there. Her message of transformation through self expression was even more powerful in such an intimate setting.

Mecca Normal’s show at Spaceland was strange. They performed a brilliant set to a sparse audience that later became enamored with the emotional breakdown of a local star on stage. What must it be like to have given birth to a scene, and then on the other end of it, to be ignored by people who don’t realize who you are or what you did for them? Another sign of the disconnect afflicting the music world at the end of a cycle.

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song 145 : Red Cloud (Mung Jung Bushi)

For his graphics series Inspired Agitators, David Lester created a poster for the great Sioux chief Red Cloud. Now Ronnie is a Crazy Horse man. He got to talking about how Red Cloud wasn’t that great a guy. David stood up for Red Cloud. Ronnie stood up for Crazy with Courage Horse (the Sioux war chief’s real name).

I was waiting for some coups to be counted.

It is true that Red Cloud’s great grand niece weaved a beautiful painted quill bracelet for Ronnie while they talked one afternoon when we toured through South Dakota. But we spent the Fourth of July on Bear Butte where Crazy with Courage Horse loved to meditate.

As a Cherokee, I yanked out a hunk of hair to leave as a prayer flag on one of the trees way up the butte. Lightning was playing all around over the plains.

I think both chiefs were quite magnificent. And I think it’s wonderful that two white boys could get so passionate about them.

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song 144 : Carcineria (Mung Jung Bushi)

Beverly Boulevard used to be the favored shortcut for those in the know from where I live in Hollywood to downtown places like The Smell, Silverlake Lounge, Spaceland, Luna Sol, MOCA, and Little Tokyo. It’s still the shortcut late at night.

The streets are lined with butcher shops with Carcineria signs. Each one has its own visual flavor depending on where the proprietor came from: Guatamala, Bolivia, Mexico, El Salvador, Burbank.

Some have hand painted signs, some are no more than simple black letters but many feature colorful scenes. Late at night they are a hub of activity where working people end their day and nightshifts start theirs: millions of stories to be told.

I think Carcineria is Spanish for food that kills but dying never tasted so good.

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song 143 : Fork (Mung Jung Bushi)

Jean wanted to give the songs neutral, innocuous names so listeners could bring their own imaginations to the tracks. One of the titles she mentioned to Ronnie as an example was fork. It could mean the fork in the road, the fork on your plate, Sartre’s flying fork of Nausea, the action of sticking an object with tines.

But for me this gamelan like song built around Dave’s echo guitar patterns and Lafrae’s African thumb piano work is about a fork in the road. Indie was dying just as quickly as the corporate dinosaurs it fought. Never before had so many of the old formulas suddenly failed. Whole touring circuits disappeared: great clubs like Small Intestine, Jabberjaw, 17 Nautical Miles, indie distributors and record stores disappeared with them.

The Internet loomed as the portal to our future. But the future wasn’t here yet and giving away music for free is a poor option for musicians like Jean who have no other steady livelihood.

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song 142 : Lost in the Mosque (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

The title is of course post 9/11. I have no idea what I was thinking of when I recorded it but today Ronnie’s Arabic sounding lick and the lyrics I came up with remind me of the confusion I felt stuck in a Tacoma hotel room watching endless repeats of the planes hitting the towers on the day I was supposed to fly home to Los Angeles.

All I kept wondering was why and how? How did the culture of Islam, once known for its superior tolerance, beautiful art, deepest poetry, and advanced medicine, why was it now famous for suicide bombers?

One of my favorite women in history is the great Sufi poetess Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya. They say she ran through the streets of her home town with a bucket of water and a burning torch. “What are you trying to do?” she was asked. “Burn down heaven and quench the fires of hell,” she answered. She wanted religious people to understand that greed and fear are not the same as love.

END OF EPISODE SIX

NEXT EPISODE SEVEN: MUNG JUNG BUSHI + MISC
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song 141 : Light and Shadow (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

Light and Shadow was the name of a critically acclaimed but obscure zine I did about how I dealt with post traumatic stress when I was touring.

Since I had been abducted into a car in tenth grade and nearly murdered there, being stuck in a van through the highs and lows of a national tour was a very intense experience.

This track focuses on the disassociation that comes with post traumatic stress. The way nothing seems to be where it’s supposed to be, including yourself.

I love the way Wes mixed my vocal in this so it’s like you’re overhearing someone confessing their innermost confusion.
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song 140 : Drain (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

We would walk down the street toward the waterfront for a meal about half way through recording every day in Tacoma. I liked those day time walks past the long grass lots, the water stretching out bright ahead.

Since we were out I’d overhear things, notice little interactions between people. In a pub I noticed a couple bickering. They were a drunk and she said something about “going around in circles.” The interesting thing is you couldn’t quite tell if this was a seduction or the end of a relationship. That’s an example of the process that usually starts a song for me when we do freestyle experiments.

Ronnie’s use of the Seek Wah pedal and Larry’s use of his wah wah created for me an image of water emptying into a drain that linked up with the idea of going around in circles.
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song 139 : Nothing New Under The Sun (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

Diane does some really sweet work on the MemoryMoog on this track. I also like when Larry kicks in about half way through and then backs down in the groove over which Diane shimmers spacey sounds.

Show me something new, I’m screaming at the band and at the world. I don’t want oil anymore. I want the next thing. I don’t want the greedy liars of self serving government anymore, I want efficient management. It’s not just the music that hasn’t changed enough.

And the thing is we’re on the verge of major change. If an environmental disaster, economic collapse, or war doesn’t pull the legs out of our fragile global culture, the changes technologies like nano and biotech are bringing in the near future will make these our days seem quaint very soon.
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song 138 : Home for the Holidays (alternate mix) (Tacoma Ballet)

This heavy on the echo mix is sparse and dreamy, it doesn’t fit the storyline as well as the version on Tacoma Ballet but I like it some ways more. You really get to hear mom ladling out her famous home made guilt at the holiday dinner.

It’s almost like a cross cultural cult, the cult of you have to spend the holiday with your families, even if it’s damaging to all, or just you.
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song 137 : Misguided Optimists of September (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

You just know that somewhere in America on September 10 2001 some poor asshole was giving a speech to a captive audience or family, in a corporate board room, or perhaps at backyard barbecue, going on and on about how you have to be an optimist, that tomorrow is a new dawn, that great things are about to happen and the world is becoming a better place every single day.

Man, they felt dumb the next day. Ironically, their optimism is more needed than ever after 9/11. This instrumental is dedicated to them.
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song 136 : Montage on a Dare (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

Whenever I hear this I want to pick up a DV cam and randomly film; preferably disturbing urban and rural scenes in black and white.

Edit a cheesy police car chase from an 80’s adventure flick in for the intro, then montage the bleak black and white footage, intercut with grainy night color street scenes appearing like visions.
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song 135 : Love isn’t Human Sacrifice (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

In my mind the word love is misapplied when it’s included with words like duty, guilt, responsibility, and the sacrifice of happiness and purpose.

When conformity and collective obligations outweigh what makes a woman herself, when she surrenders her identity under pressure to accept the acceptable role, to me it seems she becomes a human sacrifice. Not that the same thing doesn’t happen to men every day.
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song 134 : Nagging Question (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

This is another of my several portraits of post traumatic stress and hyper vigilance. The band cooks up a good groove. I open with an imitation of the insecurity and politics of scenes. Then the nagging question: do you feel safe? Post traumatic stress shows itself stuck in repetition. You lose all sense of time and reason in those seconds when the fear rekindles.

But then does anyone really feel like “it’s okay to be here?” Aristotle said that souls in bodies experience a horror best compared to the Etruscan pirate torture of tying a prisoner face to face with a corpse. Our prison is so beautiful sometimes you can forget even while remembering.

But with PST you seldom remember while forgetting, you get stuck on repeat, almost like ritualized re-enactment of what happened to you, that nags your life, can even ruin it, until you find your way to heal.
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song 133 : Haunted by Sirens in the Fog (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

I was going to call this track Titanic Overture as a nod to the original Alice Cooper Group, one of my favorite bands.

But then the title “Haunted by Sirens in the Fog” came to me. Since I’m talking about both kinds of sirens, to me this instrumental suggests the horrors of bottoming addictions.

It also points toward the God Speed You Black Emperor flavored recordings of Episode Seven: Mung Jung Bushi, when Jean Smith and David Lester of Mecca Normal joined us and master drummer LaFrae Olivia Sci for a session of instrumental improvisations.
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song 132 : Shelter (Tacoma Ballet)

The final track of Tacoma Ballet, a surprisingly tender and comforting song, inspired by Patty Schemel’s keyboard riff provided the perfect backdrop for my vocals about survival.

The story of Tacoma Ballet ends with the heroine out in the world, strong enough to smile in the rain, strong enough to come home and find comfort in the familiar evergreens, strong enough to go back into the world, anywhere she wants to go she can go.

I had no idea I was telling a story when I sang these songs. But the story is clear to me now. Ronnie noticed it first. Ginsberg’s man Randy Roark saw it right away, too.

When a graduate student in literature who likes my music dropped an outline on me, the anatomy of the story of Tacoma Ballet, I realized my experiment in trusting the creativity of the unconscious had been more successful than I could have hoped.

That’s more important to me than the fact that Tacoma Ballet made it to number one on the radio. But that both seemingly impossible things happened, that makes me smile.
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song 131 : 30 States In 30 Days (Tacoma Ballet)

I guess our heroine got in a band! It’s natural to want to spread the good news of how you can really choose to live your life the way you want to and doing that is the most important thing an American can do, especially an American female.

But all I was thinking about when I sang this song was the loss of the wonderful all ages scene that once existed all across America, which included clubs like Impala, PCH Club and Jabberjaw in Los Angeles, Small Intestine in Baltimore, 47 Nautical Miles in Portland, and many others.

I was remembering rolling up in a van in Couer D’Alene Idaho and the timid group of punk kids who explained nobody really played shows there not even local bands, only Top 40 bands in restaurant bars.

I can’t understand how the music business can abandon all those kids who love music and aren’t old enough to buy it online or to go to most shows. Anyone who loves rock and roll music knows what it means to kids to have their own bands and places to see real bands, not musical product.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 130 : Liberty Street (Tacoma Ballet)

Liberty Street is where Patti Smith stood after 9/11 to write her first poem about it.

In Tacoma Ballet’s storyline, this song finds the heroine happy on Liberty Street in New York City. She is free, she is living a life she wants to live. Not many countries in the world allow women that right.

“She goes where she wants to because she can see everything.
She doesn’t care about nothin’ but being a happy girl on her own.”
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 129 : Universal Application (Tacoma Ballet)

In the storyline this is the heroine’s goodbye to her hometown. It’s not a friendly farewell. Often they aren’t. This one only takes a moment. She’s not taking much with her to start her new life.

But this song should be equally applicable for all sorts of situations, that’s why I named it Universal Application; it’s a tool of many uses.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 128 : Happy (Tacoma Ballet)

Jack Endino’s favorite song, and one of the more popular tracks from Tacoma Ballet, Happy gets its ironic Jamaican party flavor Diane’s keyboard playing, and a great mix by Dawn Pfund.

For some reason some reviewers, including Rolling Stone, thought this was a cover of the Rolling Stones song “Happy.”

As for the storyline of Tacoma Ballet, the heroine now properly dosed takes her place in the army of the resigned where happiness is a responsibility, and how you appear is more important than who you are.

Do you know people like this? Pick up your shit and stop whining they say, like the whole world is on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. March along with a smile on your face and do what you’re told or else. They’ve stopped noticing how angry they are.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 127 : Pharmaceutical Soup (Tacoma Ballet)

Frightened by her own emotions, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet follows her parents’ advice and goes to the doctor for pills. Maybe instead of leaving home, she can rebalance her chemicals. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the town, or with her boyfriend, what’s wrong is something inside her.

“Set my life on an infinite loop, pour me some of that pharmaceutical soup.”

Legal (and illegal) drugs are sometimes used to numb the pain that we should be feeling, the pain that’s there to tell us something is wrong with our lives. .

“I’m not sick, I’m just sick of this.”
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 126 : Livia (Tacoma Ballet)

Ronnie’s only lead vocal on Tacoma Ballet seems to be in a different universe than my stream of consciousness adventure in whispering, but together I think we captured the erotic threat created by eye for an eye in relationships.

As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, the heroine’s questions about love are answered. The jealous god of the old testament is not her idea of love. If she’s going to go on she has to go on alone.

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song 125 : Love And War (Tacoma Ballet)

Ronnie’s only lead vocal on Tacoma Ballet seems to be in a different universe than my stream of consciousness adventure in whispering, but together I think we captured the erotic threat created by eye for an eye in relationships.

As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, the heroine’s questions about love are answered. The jealous god of the old testament is not her idea of love. If she’s going to go on she has to go on alone.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 124 : Kindred (Tacoma Ballet)

Probably the most popular song from Tacoma Ballet is based on the groove and hook laid down by Larry Schemel, with a really cool performance by Diane on the Prophet V and Ronnie on the Seek Wah.

In the Tacoma Ballet story here the heroine confronts the real questions of love. Will he come with her when she goes? Are they truly alike? Will it be so easy to leave her family and everything she’s always known?

But at the same time she must confront her feelings of leaving her kin. That’s the price of exploring the possibilities of life.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 123 : Aloneness (Tacoma Ballet)

“Ah this is unusual,” you can hear me gripe at the beginning of the track as the band falls into that easy Americana groove once again. But a surprising song emerges anyway. That’s one of the things I enjoy about freestyle songwriting, you can be out in left field emotionally and mentally but the words and arrangement appear anyway.

On the other end of figuring out that who she thought was love is probably only memory, our heroine confronts just how alone she feels. Alone if she leaves her home town. Alone if she stays.

“If everything is alright, why’s it feel so wrong?” her boyfriend shows up and asks her. And discovering that she’s not the only one who feels the way she does, her disappointment sails into hope.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 122 : Problematic (Tacoma Ballet)

After the deed is done, our heroine wakes up to that disjointed and raw feeling that is so often the result of backsliding into somewhere we no longer belong. It’s most often when you forget about simple human needs like sex, that they wind up giving you a sharp lesson about yourself.

The devil in the machine, when your sex drive is demonized is it any surprise you can’t find happiness?

This was one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet, which still makes me shake my head in bewilderment.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 121 : Mr. Slow (Tacoma Ballet)

This sultry cocktail blues song about hesitant seduction was singled out by most reviewers as a highlight of Tacoma Ballet. I can’t stand it. But it does feature Ronnie’s minimalist slow hand solo intertwining with Diane’s MemoryMoog moodscape, and there’s some nasty ass bass and guitar groove by Greta and Larry.

Our heroine is confronted by a less enthusiastic than expected response to seduction. Is this smoldering erotic hesitation, or the pang of conscience, or has he really lost interest?

Maybe he would go with her? Maybe he could give her a reason to stay? Maybe she should discover that he is only memory now. Maybe she just wants to have some fun.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 120 : Favorite Star (Tacoma Ballet)

The easiest way to find out if love is real is to go where it used to be and get drunk. Like a moth to flame her old love is back fluttering around the heroine of the Tacoma Ballet storyline. Her favorite star: is it him? Or Heineken? Maybe it’s the star on her vintage Converse sneakers.

“Friends don’t let friends drink and drive,” who knew how often that cautionary principle would provide an excuse for people to wind up in bed! It’s an especially useful sentiment when in the presence of ex’s.

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song 119 : Absence Breaks the Heart Grown Fonder (Tacoma Ballet)

The heroine face to face with one reason she won’t just leave, one reason she contradicts herself constantly. She thinks she’s still in love, that love still has a chance.

This song took on scary implications it didn’t have when mixing ended on September 10, 2001. Now I can’t hear it without thinking of those poor people making and receiving last phone calls as the towers neared collapse. Those people who jumped out of their windows, a few made messages out of their final flights.

I had been singing about relationships I had known and that I noticed around me, but now the song for me has the glint of panic, I always feel worried now on some subliminal level that my loved ones won’t be back when we’re separated.

Going through 9/11 when you already have post traumatic stress reinforced by more than one incident, well, it’s not hard to understand the chill that has descended across America. The return to churches. The guilty severity and gulping greed.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 118 : Note To Self (Tacoma Ballet)

The heroine of Tacoma Ballet confronts one reason for her paralyzing self contradiction. You see, there’s this guy. They aren’t together anymore. But she still loves him. So it’s not so easy to just leave home.

“Walking contradiction, living paradox” people who like this song seem to think it’s about an exasperating relationship, usually a lover or parent, occasionally a friend. It could apply as easily to anyone else, but I was talking to myself.

If you have post traumatic stress, you know the experience this song describes. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but what do you do when the different parts of you all demand action (or inaction) at once?

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song 117 : Somewhere New (Tacoma Ballet)

This is one of those improvisations that sounds carefully arranged. Great keyboard accents by Diane helped me give a voice to the longing of people who no longer belong where they’ve been too long. Somewhere New is one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet.

I noticed the kids playing across the street. They were mean little muthafuckers but you could understand how they got that way just by looking around.

In this old town boys still walk with sticks and
They try to hit all the dogs and make all the cracks
And they spot for cars at all the bars
And they know every single rock in this town
And they got to go find something new
Before they become the scenery too
They don’t want to sink into the concrete and sand
They want to go somewhere to a far off land

Join a gang or the Army, that was the main choice for a poor kid in Tacoma, from what I could see.

As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, disc 2 starts with a breakthrough. The heroine has a moment of illumination realizing she can leave; she doesn’t have to stay stuck in one place for life.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 116 : Who Is Time? (Tacoma Ballet)

I saw an old man inside a bar glaring at and through the band. Only I noticed him. Several times in Tacoma apparently innocent scenes suggested murder to me. I didn’t know the history of the infamous Tacoma serial killer.

Some months later a body was dumped behind the recording studio, in a neglected area of long grass where I liked to stand and look out over Tacoma harbor. Apparently the victim of a drug deal gone bad.

In this song I rolled up all the paranoia into a contemplation of the old character Father Time, the ultimate killer.

In the Tacoma Ballet story this is a turning point for our heroine, some call it apathy or complacency, but maybe the best word, for the half way point in this her journey of transformation, is resignation.

Disc 1 I called “What is the Answer?” one of the two last sentences spoken by the great writer Gertrude Stein as she lay dying.

Disc 2 I called “What is the Question?” the last thing she said before she breathed her last.

The heroine of Tacoma Ballet’s answer was an oppressive history, personal, local and national, a world of bullying and decay, and resignation.

The only way to change the answer is to change the question.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 115 : Lucretia (Tacoma Ballet)

This song is dedicated to Tye “Lucretia” Smith one of the founders of Revolution Rising, co-editor of my infamous zine TVi, and editor of her own zine Meathook.

In the Tacoma Ballet story, our heroine visits her best friend, who reads the Tarot cards for her. Tye used to do that at Revolution Rising fund raisers. I had my tarot cards read by her just before Lucid Nation started, at a show Heavens to Betsy headlined.

A good Tarot reader can shake you up and point you right. Things may not be better but they make sense again. Choice is restored.

Ronnie’s a good Tarot reader, too, by the way. Is it automatic with these dark haired gypsy types?

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 114 : Everyone's Got An Area 51 (Tacoma Ballet)

It’s like seeing a UFO when you discover just how corrupt and violent most history is. And nobody wants to believe you but those who have had the same experience of discovery.

But what the hell, let’s say our heroine actually sees a UFO in the desert over by Spokane. That’s not what the song is really about anyway.

Everyone’s Got an Area 51 is about the paranoid and violent, territorial side of human beings, and the way it gets triggered by fear of the unknown. Area 51 is just another name for Manzanar.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 113 : Tacoma Ballet (Tacoma Ballet)

This is the second song about the Japanese internment camp kids.

Tacoma Ballet’s bells are played by Ronnie on a guitar processed through an Electro Harmonix Frequency Analyzer.

The children playing and dogs barking were on a sound effects LP producer Wes Weresch had been saving for the day when a band would record a song about the subject.

Manzanar Recess had captured the aggressive side of the internment camp experience in America, but what about the sympathy I was feeling for the children.

I’m surprised how many listeners didn’t catch the irony when I sing about god and jesus. Not a religious affirmation, a poke at those religious warriors who in the name of misguided self righteousness harm the innocent while mouthing clichés of faith.

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song 112 : Manzanar Recess (Tacoma Ballet)

Doing some snooping around, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet finds the answer to her question. The town is hiding a terrible secret.

The abandoned building next door to Uptone, before becoming a flop house where Nirvana played, was a school for Japanese American children. During World War 2 American GI’s showed up and took all the kids away at gunpoint to be incarcerated in a concentration camp at Manzanar.

For years, they say, you could sneak inside and see all the rooms left as they were, pens on paper, books open, covered with dust and spider webs. The story inspired two songs, this one and Tacoma Ballet.

Here’s what Ginsberg’s man Randy Roark had to say: “As for the contents of Tamra's mind this time out, we begin with the vague dread and paranoia common to many works of art created in the days preceding 9/11. And in at least one example truly worthy of Blake (or Kafka), the song "Manzanar Recess" is about the fascist underpinnings of concepts like "homeland" defense (using those words), and how the government will soon know where we are and what we're doing "24/7." (For those unfamiliar with Manzanar, it was a United States concentration camp built in the California desert where we interned Japanese nationals for the duration of World War II.)”

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song 111 : This Old Town (Tacoma Ballet)

Embracing misery turns out not to be so much fun.

Embracing the darkness you feel doesn’t get rid of the reasons why you feel it.

But why is that this old town doesn’t like looking close? What is it dying to hide? Maybe the problem isn’t the heroine’s, maybe the problem is all around her.

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song 110 : Sweet Misery (Tacoma Ballet)

This rocking little faux southern rock song is one of my favorite tracks on Tacoma Ballet.

The heroine of the story, with a hangover and a dirty feeling about what seemed exciting the night before, decides that if misery is her lot then she will learn to love misery, she will become a misery artist.

Diane had never played with a band before and had very little musical experience. I invited her to play after reading about dada and the value of inexperience in exploring the frontiers of art. Wes had analog synthesizers including a MemoryMoog, a Sequential Circuits Prophet V, an Optagon, and a Fender Rhodes.

I think the experiment was a great success. With her refined sense of design and deep knowledge of art and avant-garde rock history, Diane’s performance is a highlight and was much praised by reviewers.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 109 : Point of No Return (Tacoma Ballet)

The heroine decides what she needs is “a little bit less self control.” But the healthy instinct for rebellion finds no inspiration but beer commercials and the hot sex insinuations of advertising.

Sometimes you can find out things about yourself in the arms of a stranger. Sometimes alcohol can open doors you didn’t know you had. But sometimes it’s only a reprieve, and the next morning nothing has changed.

Where there’s a will there’s a way is a joke if you don’t know where you are going, and how many people do?
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song 108 : Home for the Holidays (Tacoma Ballet)

The heroine, feeling lost, goes home and we get to meet her family. When she shares at the table a moment of her terrible realization in a comment about rainbows, hoping for comfort, she gets a lecture from mom about ruining dinner instead. “If you were a good person you wouldn’t think those kinds of things…”

First I laid down the stream of consciousness track about a girl going home to her dysfunctional family for the holidays. Listening back the chorus became clear to me so I recorded it while we were mixing. It’s one of the more popular songs from Tacoma Ballet.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 107 : Fall (Tacoma Ballet)

Depressed now, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet, surveys her life and her town in the season of the falling leaves.

And who tore down that last nest
to put up toxic boxes?
Idolizing the obnoxious
we curse ourselves for being cautious.
Some kind of primal dissatisfaction
rules our every action

Ronnie used a variety of rare pedals provided by Guitar Maniac including a very early guitar synthesizer, a late sixties Univibe, a Morley Echo Chorus, a Mu-tron 3, plus his own Tubeplex, the modern update of the Echoplex.

In his search for interesting sounds he tried unusual methods such as, in this song, playing guitar by whipping the strings with a broken rubber band.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 106 : Hallow (Tacoma Ballet)

In the story Tacoma Ballet, our heroine now recalls her ex-boyfriend. Not a macho pretender with a guitar, a poet of the real kind. She has not gotten over the heartbreak of their break up. Anyway soon enough she’ll discover he’s not what she thought anyway.

But I had no idea I was telling the larger story. To me this song was about playing with Patty Schemel who was almost drummer for Nirvana. Since there was an abandoned building next door where Nirvana had rocked the squat I was imagining that his ghost was hanging out to see what we were up to. So I sang him this song, though I never met him.

I wanted to add a third pun to the hello/how low theme of Tobi Vail’s Hamster Baby, later used to such great effect in Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 105 : Seven Stringer (Tacoma Ballet)

I think of this song and of Punkophony from Suburban Legends as musical book ends.
Punkophony skewers punk elitists. Seven Stringer goes after the pretentious of a different sort: the boy’s club of professional metal and virtuoso guitarists.

As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, even rock and roll fails our heroine, because it’s just another kind of boy’s club. She’s even willing to play along. But they are disappointing anyway. What do you expect from re-enactors?

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 104 : End of the Line (Tacoma Ballet)

I see her walking through the tall grass of an empty lot deep in thought in her neighborhood, the nameless heroine of the story Tacoma Ballet.

This song surprised me by becoming one of the most popular on Tacoma Ballet. It’s so damn slow, but people love the atmosphere. One reason I think is the beautiful tone of the lead Ronnie plays in the background.

Thanks to the generosity of Guitar Maniac store owner Rick King, for the Tacoma Ballet sessions Ronnie used a 52 Telecaster (not a reissue!), a 1966 Gibson Flying V, and a 1958 Fender Jazzmaster (which Rick had earlier loaned to Unwound for their Leaves Turn Inside You sessions). On this track he’s playing the tele.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 103 : Big Dog (Tacoma Ballet)

Another song to set the scene for the story, Big Dog is about America, yes, but it’s also about growing up a girl in a society where girls aren’t valued as highly as boys, where men are encouraged to throw around their weight.

This describes the atmosphere of the heroine’s country, town, and family. Might makes right, feed the strong and there won’t be any trouble.

The lyric was inspired by Shaquille O’Neal bitching constantly about needing the ball during the Lakers three-peat years. “You got to feed the big dog,” Shaq would mumble with a crooked smile.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 102 : Welcome to America (Tacoma Ballet)

You can hear me telling the band I want punk rock and fast, but look what they gave me! Tacoma, and the Woody Guthrie Exhibition at the Tacoma Museum, had cast an Americana music spell I had to go with.

John Lennon said he didn’t feel he’d done his job unless his song was censored. This song has the distinction of being censored by liberals and conservatives alike! In Portland Maine the radio station received complaints from listeners who didn’t hear the sarcasm in my portrayal of America seducing and bullying. But the song was also censored by a few college stations in military towns.

This is one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet. As for the concept album storyline, Welcome to America sets the stage like in a movie when the camera out in space focuses first on America before zooming down to the city, and then the street where the story takes place.

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song 101 : Happy Accident (Tacoma Ballet)

All Tacoma Ballet tracks are 100% improvised freestyle except infrequent backing vocals. In this song I threw down the dare, summoning inspiration from artists like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, exploring spontaneous creation in the belief that there are no mistakes if you pay close enough attention.

I’m singing to the band while the 2 inch 24 track tape was spinning: “What can this puppy do?” “Please do something wrong!” “There are no mistakes here. There are no mistakes!”

I was giving them the philosopher’s stone, the secret of the ages, the treasure Jimi Hendrix, Gertrude Stein, and Kerouac had taught me. But listen to the cowards! Do you hear any one of them freaking out into something inappropriate? No, they are committed to the groove. It pissed me off, but we made a good record together anyway.

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song 100 : Coyote (and DJ outro) (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

One of Lucid Nation’s biggest hits from the popular DNA CD, even though I wrote the lyrics, I still considered this Grit’s song. I had expected it to be a very heavy emotional experience for me, but the previous song Déjà vu had released so much emotion, Coyote came out surprisingly light hearted.

I was still moving forward, I was still singing, I was here on the radio, singing to L.A. held hostage by a storm. All the misfortunes and heartbreaks of my life, I was still turning them into music, still letting them go. They could have wiped me out but they didn’t. Like the song says: “Hey you missed me.”

The end turns surprisingly sunny to close our set. A reminder that the clouds will part one day and sunshine always returns. “Whoa, little coyote, rock on coyote.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

EPISODE FIVE: THE END

coming soon:

EPISODE SIX: TACOMA BALLET AND OUTTAKES

song 099 : Déjà vu (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

This moody song about a lost friend is one of my favorite freestyle improvisations. The band was swept away into something special. My stream of consciousness lyrics clicked on this track, inspired by the guitarists who both gave wonderful performances out of thin air.

Since I knew Coyote was coming up next I returned to searching my feelings about Margaret and our lost band. Ronnie’s melancholic opening lick had been a favorite of our ex drummer Tia, but we never had a chance to make it into a song. It was the perfect starting place for a complete catharsis, a ritual purging of the sadness I felt about the end of my mostly girl band.

Am I singing about Margaret most of the time in this song, or myself? Both of us, I guess. I doubted she was listening anymore. I was singing about all the lonely coyotes out there, the runaways, the throwaways, the students in their claustrophobic rooms listening in the dark, the drivers on the freeway, all of us ultimately alone in the midnight storm.

KXLU is a Jesuit college. At the beginning of the song I can barely be heard saying into a toy megaphone: “please control your Jesuits.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 098 : Pimpin' (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

The shocking thing is I remembered most of the lyrics even though I made no effort to! It’s always more fun when you can hear a hustler work his mark twice!

I think the wailing saxophone and chaotic rise and fall of the guitars on this version of Pimpin’ gives an even better background for the quintessential Hollywood (or New York or Baghdad) conversation. I like the way this version ends with a musical interlude of sad irony and my brief quip of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 097 : Kerouac (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

Kerouac’s live recordings of him reading his own work became perhaps the most important influence on my work by the time the DNA and Suburban Legend CDs were recorded. Since then and even now Jack’s voice is my favorite thing to listen to before I write songs, and before I record.

In the song “GKM” from the DNA and Public Domain CDs I whispered about Jack talking to me from behind the moon. In this song of thanks to a teacher I never met, I used a haiku like minimalism similar to Jack’s “pomes” to conjure poignancy from a few facts and reflections about his life and about his influence on my art.

The dock that Kerouac was standing on giving me advice was not on any earthly ocean. Improvising lyrics is for me like dreaming. I like thinking that I got a visit from him as I stood at the edge of the unknown that is total improvisation, holding a handshake out to his ghost.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 096 : Run Throught The Jungle (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

I returned to one of my favorite songwriters, John Fogerty, for this pessimistic though pre-9/11 prediction about the Bush presidency and the ascendancy of the American right wing.

I had seen riot grrrl, the Koo’s peace punk scene, and my band, evaporate right before my eyes. The stock market had crashed ending the go go Clinton good times. You could feel the bastards itching for war.

New inventions of war were ready to test. New strategies to keep America the vampire sucking the world’s resources to the bitter end were eager for implementation. New doctrines to fight the baby vampire nations we foster all across the globe awaited action.

With immigration laws pending that would institutionalize a slave population, the war against the middle class trumpeted on CNN daily, and the rich getting richer by gigantic gulps of wealth and power, to me this song sounds even timelier today than it did when I recorded it.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 095 : Night Prowler PCH (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

Alright, I know I crow my own praises plenty, but slipping from Pere Ubu’s Heart of Darkness into AC/DC’s Night Prowler with a dash of Sonic Youth’s Pacific Coast Highway at the end, man, if you can’t see how bad ass I am, then fuck you anyway.

By this time Night Prowler PCH was no longer a catharsis, a healing cleansing for me, it was a powerful anthem, a song that I liked to start every rehearsal with because it made me feel strong.

As somebody who heard the words “get in the car” and was dragged into a car at the beginning of an abduction that was nearly murder, being able to sing those words with total comfort, with a sense of my own power, was an accomplishment.

This version strays into sarcasm, especially with Ronnie’s Cobain inspired goofy lead guitar deconstruction of the famous Angus Young solo. It seems to me to capture the overall experience of assault: the terror, the loss of control, the lulls, the moment of utter crisis, the shocky sleepy aftermath, even the absurdity.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 094 : Heart Of Darkness (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

A cover of the great Pere Ubu track was suggested by bassist John Sellers. I hadn’t been a Pere Ubu fan but I became one as soon as I heard this song. Rocket from the Tomb’s version from the early 1970s was our model.

It really described how I felt at the time. After all the heartbreaks Lucid Nation had so far brought me, here I was without even one other girl in my band.

I added more lyrics about runaways because the theme went so well with David Thomas’s great lines like:

“Maybe I’m a shadow on the wall,
maybe love is a tomb where you dance at night
maybe sanctuary is an electric light
and I’m so tired I feel like another man

and everything I see seems so underhanded.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 093 : Shell (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

My favorite bass player of all time is Margaret Maldonado. She’s one of the most tortured Cancerians I’ve known and she has good reason to be, a whole list of good reasons and none of them are really her fault, more like an unjust society’s results.

Without Margaret’s help, and her truck, we never would have made it to this gig. Her suffering sometimes spilled over, creating ugly scenes and desperate moments during our friendship, but somehow Ronnie and I had the knack of making her laugh.

So here was the bass player I wanted in my band, the anchor of the band that months ago Danny Goldberg had almost signed, acting as roadie for an all male line up I didn’t even really want to be playing with. We found another way to get our gear home and she took off before we started playing.

I figured she’d listen to at least a little of the set. I knew we were going to do her song Coyote to close. I didn’t think she’d listen all the way to the end. So this short desperate song was for Margaret. In a way the entire set was my funeral for our lost band and a tribute to a friendship I could feel slipping away.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 092 : Children of the Night (Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU)

An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 underage girls have been forced into prostitution in the United States, and that’s only counting the girls. Prostitution claims 90% of runaways, or throwaways as I call kids like myself who don’t run away, they get thrown out.

A sophisticated set up snares them. Pimps use attractive fellow minors as lures and managers (they only get juvi time). Drugs, beatings, gang rape, then tenderness and more drugs are the common formula whether you are in Atlanta or Istanbul. The number of girls suffering this fate worldwide has to be counted in the millions. And to think most people consider their nations civilized!

I was thinking about the runaways and the throwaways as we drove to this gig through the coldest, darkest, wettest storm Los Angeles had seen in decades. We were about to play a benefit for Children of the Night, once of the few organizations in the United States doing anything to help these kids.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 091 : Memo to the Woodstock Nation

Not exactly an “I hate hippies” rant, this song seethes with a rather venomous denunciation of the Sixties generation, who it seems to me squandered noble beginnings in a mass retreat to church and bank.

I get pretty specific here. You can tell just how much of a skilled insulting bitch I really am, and why I was no fun at the family dinner table!

“And then you got old
And then it was sold
Then it became the thing that holds you back
In your beautiful fucking sixties love
In your beautiful fucking sixties love
Your beautiful self loving minds
That keep everyone else far behind.”

This track has never been released anywhere before.

How’s that for poetry made up on the spot, homes? Yeah man I was beginning to feel skills in me I didn’t know I had. My fascination with full improvisation had only just begun.

NEXT EPISODE NONPOETIC RAIN: LIVE ON KXLU

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 090 : Hate in the Summer Heat (Outtake)

According to Ronnie, the only reason he allowed this song about the Freudian super ego of a Cop to appear here is that he likes the way at the end of the song I used my guitar to tell him fuck you.

But I like this song. I think some cool things happened in spontaneous arrangement.

Pretend it’s your thoughts and the things you say as you pursue your day of strutting through the world as a cop. The perp, the babe, the moments of doubt and bravado, the little voice of the conscience, they are all there. I think it’s funny, and deep.

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song 089 : Blue Kitty (Outtake)

This blues stomp was just for fun but lots of people like it, especially cat lovers, of course, who can identify with both sides of the pun I play, a lost cat, and a lost lover.

About half way through the song there’s a surprise as the backing vocals arrive to spin the whole thing into a blues jam lament with vocals splintering like the fractured thoughts of the recently abandoned.

I like the way I twisted the Robert Johnson line from Love in Vain into my own version of the red and blue.

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song 088 : Israel Fake Heel (Outtake)

Ronnie takes over the mic for some freestyle experimentation about a conversation with Jacob after he wrestled the Angel. Ronnie was born Jewish; and Jacob was the father of the Twelve Tribes. Ronnie says he visualized himself as Virgil in Dante’s Inferno leading this most distant ancestor through a modern city, perhaps so they could both wonder about the angel’s strange blessing.

His puns on calm down and come down and is real and Israel the Biblical character remind me of some of Gertrude Stein’s word games. Ronnie was Poet in Residence for Newtopia Magazine for three years. He quotes the line “self congratulatory monologue between celebrities” from the pages of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.

I’m always trying to get him to sing more his words are so good but he is convinced there’s nothing left for male singers to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times. He’s the first person who told me about the great poet Rimbaud’s statement over a hundred years ago that the future of poetry belongs to women, the unheard half of humanity.

That’s me making all those spooky guitar sounds. I love making desolate noises on electric guitars, what can I say. This track has never been released anywhere before.


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song 087 : Carolina Highway Serenade (Outtakes)

I’m walking the tightrope between satire and sincerity as I discover poignancy in my sarcastic portrayal of a jilted redneck girl. It’s also a tribute to the GTO that died on me every time I tried to drive it because an as yet un-replaced part that worked till then gave out like some foul automobile domino theory.

But what a beautiful car! Designed by DeLorean before he went cocaine crazy, it’s a dream in Midnight Green with a touch of rainbow flake in the paint, original Verduro Green interior, and best of all a 1969 Coupe with Ram Air 4. They made less than two hundred of these.

I always wanted to let that thing go on some backwoods two lane, not for a race, fuck competition, no, just to let her out on a long straight road and see what she could do. That thought evolved into the story of a typical relationship not just in the South.

I don’t know why we didn’t put this song on Suburban Legends, it’s a favorite for a lot of people who like our music, I guess because it’s southern rock and it’s funny while still being sad. Plus everyone likes to drive.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 086 : Gone (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

For some reason all my life I’ve never been able to enjoy a decent heater in my bedroom. Even now that I live in a nice house the heater in the bedroom doesn’t really work and it’s impossible to fix. I wasn’t just describing the winter chilled, heater-less recording studio. I was also describing the plight of the homeless in downtown L.A. all around the studio. The play on concrete stairs and stares is a moment of spontaneous poetry I’m proud of.

But I was also singing about a different kind of cold. Cold people, cold behavior, the way society always seems to put the freeze on people who want to be artists. I mean, it’s a cliché, the starving artist. The shivering artist earns his fame like Washington and the Continental army earning victory in Valley Forge. Why should it have to be that way?

By the way, you want to know something weird? Suburban Legends was a hit on West Point’s radio station.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 085 : Cold (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

For some reason all my life I’ve never been able to enjoy a decent heater in my bedroom. Even now that I live in a nice house the heater in the bedroom doesn’t really work and it’s impossible to fix. I wasn’t just describing the winter chilled, heater-less recording studio. I was also describing the plight of the homeless in downtown L.A. all around the studio. The play on concrete stairs and stares is a moment of spontaneous poetry I’m proud of.

But I was also singing about a different kind of cold. Cold people, cold behavior, the way society always seems to put the freeze on people who want to be artists. I mean, it’s a cliché, the starving artist. The shivering artist earns his fame like Washington and the Continental army earning victory in Valley Forge. Why should it have to be that way?

By the way, you want to know something weird? Suburban Legends was a hit on West Point’s radio station.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 084 : Vampire (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

I think this is another good example of the way a song can happen through a band as if one force had inspired all five of us. We could only follow subtle hunches and half the sound but we were consciously trying to create something vital from a form of art (rock music) that thanks to TV commercials, sitcoms, political campaigns and Hollywood movies has become so trite and familiar it has become what it feared most.

We were listening inwardly, following commands we couldn’t really understand until we heard what they created when put together. This is more spoken word than song, but there is singing, it’s not exactly a story, more like an exploration into deep inner space as I chase the shadow, that part of ourselves that we all want to deny or that we fall into and disappear. I liked what Randy Roark said about this one so much I’m adding it here again:

"Vampire" takes us into a very interesting Hall of Mirrors--at first the qualities of the vampire are enumerated--not the kind we find in Anne Rice novels but rather the ones we meet at parties--the ones William Burroughs warned us against; the ones whom, he said, leave you feeling as if you're down a quart of blood. But Tamra goes way beyond even Burroughs--here her monologue mutates from describing the vampiric qualities in others to her recognizing those same qualities in herself.”

Danette does some nice guitar and volume pedal work.


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song 083 : Little Sister (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

Speaking of Grit’s insane bass skills, check out the intro of this short song with a long comment. This song is about the good people who helped me along the way, who leaned down and took the time to answer me when I was ignorant or otherwise in need. My big sisters, I’m going to pause to thank them now.

Girl Jesus for adopting us like lost puppies and taking us by the hand through the infancy of Lucid Nation, letting us use their rehearsal space, and their gear, but not their bathroom so Debbie and I had to pee in coffee cans outside. Now that’s suffering for your art! The neighborhood chapter of the Mexican gang that hung out kitty corner and across the street eyeing us like prey, held at bay only by their respect for the majestic Goth Mongol horde of four that was the band Girl Jesus in 1994.

Donna Dresch for Copper River salmon and Martha and the screen door in the Bikini Kill house ginger cat ranch, and for almost playing with Patty and us on Tacoma Ballet, and for playing toy keyboard with us at our second show opening for Team Dresch at an art gallery in downtown Los Angeles with a painting of St. Elvis of Excess looking down on us and Colonel Kirby of the Cacophony Society filming it all but the tape can’t be pried from the archive, and fixing my guitar in front of the Olympia Theater, and too many more to list them all.

Jody Bleyle for calling us at the motel and talking to Ronnie about how good his tone was after the disastrous show where, snubbed by all riot grrrl, Debbie first stopped playing midset, the beginning of the end. Jody for saying she could tell we’d be good if we kept at it, Jody talking to Ronnie from behind the drums when we opened for Hazel at the Showcase Theater and our drummer Erin had to sneak out her window because she was grounded. Jody for singing topless like an amazon at The Garage in Silverlake and at first I was embarrassed for her but then I realized male rockers do it all the time and a light went on in my head. Jody for playing bass when we recorded FUBAR for Peta’s Fat Wreck compilation but we were cut for sounding too raw, and too many more to list.

Kaia for singing Freewheel while we all cried at UCLA in the mess hall on her birthday just after Team Dresch broke up, Kaia and all the girls of Team Dresch because it didn’t matter to them that I was blond, or not a lesbian, or that I played rock,. Kaia and all the girls of Team Dresch like Melissa, Toni, and Jack for being so honest and helpful and balls out and true. The first time I saw them when they all joyously swapped instruments and excelled at them all I was enlightened. Kaia because she loves the color orange.

Madigan, for her constant encouragement and enlightenment and the big box of original riot grrrl zines, and the original Tattle Tale kitty drum, and her high school copy of The Bacchae. Jean Smith for starting the whole damn thing and going strong and long like a master. Kathleen for her advice about how to record singing, and her honesty about the pressures of being the lady at the front of the ship. Jennifer Finch for telling me what to do when you get a letter from a suicidal fan. Courtney Love for introducing me to Danny Goldberg and Slim Moon, our photographer Marina Vain. Cyn and Steph, Blue and Stefunny of Food Not Bombs, and most of all the Revolution Rising grrrls.

And many more big sisters and even a few big brothers like Ginsberg’s man Randy Roark and Nitebob; there are far too many to list but I thank them all. And the best way I can think to thank them is to try to do what they did for me for my little sisters and brothers.


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song 082 : Dark Pool (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

I started out thinking about my black cat Jett walking through some bamboo. When I improvise songs I rarely get the whole picture at once, I get a first line that usually starts with some trivial memory or fantasy or observation and I follow that first line, vision by vision as they arrive in my head, and on the good ones like this one something much deeper emerges than what I would have come up with had I sat down to write a song the old fashioned way.

This is more a story than a song, I do some singing but more story telling. I was thinking what if Kurt really did kill himself? What would he be experiencing as he walked down the green tunnel past the dark pool into that room? (I’m a morbid Capricorn who liked In Utero so much it was the only I thing I listened to for a year in my Mitsubishi Mighty Max which I never should have lent to Tia.)

Listen to Grit’s insane bass moans like a viola mourning in the background towards the end.

Even though I never met him, I miss Kurt.


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song 081 : Commercial (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

I had been reading The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, a book written about forty years ago that major eggheads like to dismiss as post communist hyper intellectuality but to me that book is a word scalpel cutting through all the bullshit foisted on us everyday. I had to read him slow. I had to read one sentence over and over again till I could crack open the meaning.

Debord describes the world as it is. The world of factories churning out anonymous nonsense, a hundred different brands of the same thing, so you can pretend you have choices in life.

The world where appearing is more important than being, where most people are guinea pigs of the AMA, willing wage slaves whose love of liberty can be short circuited with issues like abortion or distracted with a new coat of unexpected colors packaging the latest brand of the same old shit.

The world of media transmitting longing, the never can be satisfied emptiness that sends rich girls on shopping binges and sends poor girls to jail, every TV commercial is aimed right at it.


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song 080 : Climb (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

A rare example of a song that is both popular with people who like Lucid Nation and a favorite of mine, Climb is all flower vines and crescendos. Ronnie’s moody guitar playing, using his volume knob to create E-bow type sounds, and the stupendous female rhythm section of Grit Maldonado and Tia Sprocket, really got me going on this one.

The song is partly about Courtney Love, whom I had met online when she first hit AOL like a tornado; in fact I had been responsible for that. Just after Kurt Cobain’s death, Courtney’s father showed up on AOL selling anti suicide shirts in her name. I asked Jennifer Finch if that was okay, and next thing I knew Courtney was sending her email through me to people like Danny Goldberg and Slim Moon.

Over the next few years she was a comet that would sometimes enter my orbit, most conspicuously when Patty Schemel was staying at my house while rehearsing with Courtney for her Hollywood Bowl debacle.

I think this track beautifully captures my ambivalence about her. But it’s about more than Courtney, yes the flowers are her fans, but they are also flowers, and the larger theme of the song is the way everything in nature climbs without quite knowing why or where; you know, that e word: evolution.

Here’s what Randy Roark had to say about this song: "Climb" is probably my favorite track for the way it slowly comes into focus. Somewhere around the 3-minute mark everything coalesces into a very moving and powerful forward motion that carries it to the end.”


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song 079 : Hometown (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

One of the funnier reviews of Suburban Legends contained a swipe at this song for being inelegant in its use of “funk,” too busy was the complaint. Of course that was the point of the song, to capture the threatening claustrophobia of my hometown, Los Angeles.

The meowing at the beginning, one of my more annoying mic habits, quickly segues into a brief tribute to a great all ages club in Baltimore that had recently closed, The Small Intestine; a club so beloved Fugazi came to play the final show.

But the song is all about growing up in a barrio of Los Angeles. My favorite part of the lyrics is:
“Sometimes the heat gets so bad you just stand outside to breathe
dangerous habit
sometimes the heat’s so high sometimes at night you just want to drive
get shot, it happened”


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song 078 : Bad Seed/Yellow Light (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

I had just watched the black and white movie Bad Seed late one night. While not a psychotic killer as a little girl, I did physically resemble the one in this movie somewhat. And my family, probably because my older brother was a sociopath, always seemed to be expecting me to blossom into some prodigy of evil at any moment. I was actually honest and like many Capricorn kids, more civilized than the adults surrounding me.

The track evolved into a study of the way human beings develop powerful mental ruts. Even though I was making the words up as I went, I was following the rule of rhymes, “I still drive between the lines” I sang. But then I and the whole band seemed to pause at the threshold of a new world.

As I wondered about the bridge between the overly familiar and the unknown, “you can still drive over the mountains” I sang and the band lifted me into a mystical reunion with the fountain of inspiration, the yellow sun, the eternal return. (I was born on Dec 22 at the exact point astrologers call galactic center. It’s the moment when the sun waxes again).

This was one of the most popular songs from Suburban Legends and one friend says it saved her life by pulling her out of a suicidal depression when she first heard it.


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song 077 : Hypervigilant (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

This song is about post traumatic stress, specifically the PST of a rape victim. Fellow survivors will recognize the irrational and hyper-alert paranoia that can suddenly sweep over you in the night.

When serious poets began comparing me to Gertrude Stein I hadn’t read her work yet. When I did I was stunned by the compliment, and Gertrude became a huge influence on me. Not only was she the Jimi Hendrix of words, proving there are no mistakes, but the way she piled up work and didn’t trouble herself too much about how many people noticed, made sense to me, and inspired me to focus on recording instead of live shows.

An example of the word games that earned me those comparisons to Gertrude Stein is the way I take the cliché “everything is going for me” and apply it to lights and other appliances left running for reassurance. .

Here’s what Allen Ginberg’s assistant Randy Roark had to say about this song: "Hypervigilant" is the smartest (and spookiest) song on Suburban Legends--a truly frightening monologue on what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night, listening so hard that even silence has its own sound--a sound strikingly similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "Telltale Heart."


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song 076 : Las Vegas (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

The instrumental version of this song on the DNA and Public Domain CDs was singled out by Alternative Press when they included Lucid Nation in their list of 100 Bands You Need to Know in 2002 which pissed me off because I love the lyrics and vocal I did for this one. But removing my voice was the only way Candiria producer Mike Barile and Nitebob could mix Las Vegas for our DNA CD.

Now you’ll begin to hear what I mean about some sort of spirit that can inspire a band, this is the first of the songs where I feel something special happened. It all started with a story about the first penis Grit ever saw, which happened to be in a taxi in Las Vegas. As I sang Las Vegas unfolded before me and I felt the certainty that I could trust the stream of my consciousness. I started having fun.


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song 075 : Girl Band (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

Purposely short and abrupt, a broken fragment, this is my tribute to a lost moment in girl history when female bands seemed to flower in every school, and all ages clubs all over America rang with the sounds of songs by girls daring to speak their minds. Almost every single one of those bands is gone now. From famous bands like Bikini Kill to hardly known wonders like Crown for Athena.

I tried to help create a grrrl music scene in Los Angeles. We had some good girl bands here like Girl Jesus, Shrinking Violet, Tummyache, The Makeshift Conspiracy and Foxfire. But for some reason what was possible in Olympia, Washington was not possible here. We didn’t have a girl friendly progressive record label. The bands and fans gave in to gossip and backstabbing.

But like I say at the fade out of the song: “…across the black pattern there were stars, the sky was full of stars” and every star was a band, and the black pattern was the patriarchal world of silenced girls.


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song 074 : Punkophony (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

I was thinking back to the various snubs I’d met with in the riot grrrl and punk scene. The perfectly dressed, haircut and tattooed punk, handsome as a movie star, getting picked up in his mom’s Jaguar, after dissing everyone at the show. The riot grrrl control freaks who felt compelled to personally denounce me for being a “privileged blond,” or for making music they didn’t like. Like smarmy TV commercials their purpose was to make people feel insecure.

I grew up in a barrio, got thrown out of my parent’s house at seventeen, and was using music to regain my voice after nearly being murdered during abduction in tenth grade, so their snobbery stood out in high contrast. In this song I was throwing off all their shackles to worship rock and roll. It was a pivotal moment of liberation for me as a singer.

I was not picking on Olympia, Washington specifically, but I could not resist including that capitol of elitist non-conformists! I used to wonder what it was like to have the kind of support people like Kathleen and Corin had from the start: the labels, the scenes, the fellow bands, the ensuing hordes of faithful. Los Angeles wasn’t like that.


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song 073 : LA River (mixed by Neil Perry)

This track has never before been released in any way anywhere.

So how did we meet Nitebob? When we played Neil’s mixes for Tia on the Luscious Jackson bus when Lilith Fair hit southern California she said: “we have a problem.” Tia told us to have Nitebob do a mix just for comparison. Subsequently, Bob became such a good friend to Lucid Nation that he named his kitty Lucy after us!

Personally I like all the mixes of this song; I think Neil’s has a music box clarity that brings out a side of the song the other mixes missed.

NEXT: EPISODE FOUR
SUBURBAN LEGENDS (including outtakes)


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song 072 : Coyote (Out take)

This track has never before been released in any way anywhere. It's mixed by Neil Perry who mixed "1979" for Smashing Pumpkins and "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. Danny Goldberg of Led Zeppelin and Nirvana fame brought Neil in to do some mixes when we were close to signing with Artemis.

Neil sat and listened to dozens of tracks including all our improvisations and told us they had "the mescaline afterglow of The Doors." When he started comparing me seriously to Jim Morrison I felt like I was hallucinating. After all, Neil's dad had mixed classic records like Beggar's Banquet for the Rolling Stones.

Neil told me a story about how Keith Richards had let him strum a guitar actually owned by the great blues legend and ultimate root of rock and roll Robert Johnson.

With a Protools rig from hell complete with all the updated doodads only endorsed kahunas enjoy, Neil produced this surprisingly bare and restrained mix.

If you play it back to back with Nitebob and Barile’s mix of Coyote you’ll see just how much a mix can affect your experience of a performance! It’s not that Barile changed anything or added anything, he would say he restored the vitality of the live sound. But Neil was mixing for radio. It had to sound good on tiny speakers!


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song 071 : Las Vegas the Instrumental (DNA + Outtakes)

One of the editors at Alternative Press singled this song out when he picked us for their Top 200 Bands You Need to Know 2002.

This is a full improv song and I actually sang on it as you’ll hear when the Hundred Song March reaches our Suburban Legends CD. But the vocal had so much bleed over it left too little room for Mr. Barile and Nitebob to make a good mix. When I eavesdropped on them listening to the final mix at Unique they said it sounded like Jimmy Page playing with Pink Floyd, so I didn’t feel so bad about being left out.

In 2006 Las Vegas the Instrumental was chosen for the soundtrack of avant garde porn film maker Jack the Zipper’s latest opus. I like pornography when it’s done by willing and creative people which is rare. Jack was a musician in the band Crash Worship. His films continue their dark arty theme.


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song 070 : GKM (DNA + Outtakes)

The stream of consciousness spoken word ending of GKM was inspired by an experience I had on tour. I was sick in the back of the van, high on sleeplessness, fever and cold pills. We were in a desolate part of Utah.

As the wheels hummed along the freeway in the dark we rarely saw another car. Through the back seat window I could see the moon full and huge in the sky. Jack Kerouac was playing on the CD player. He was talking about the moon. I might have been sick, but I was on the road.

The song is about our national tour, it’s a pretty straightforward set of notes. “Ashes to ashes in a coffee cup.”


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song 069 : Fun (DNA + Outtakes)

I was tired of singing. I wanted to play guitar. We kept telling each other to just jam and have some fun. While we improvised Ronnie turned the whole idea of fun into an ironic deconstruction of the traditional horny rock blues shout ala Morrison ad nauseum.

Ronnie blends menace, eroticism, and mysticism with his sarcasm and achieves a primal rock howl of invitation. As for me, I went nuts with echo and distortion! Get a load of that female rhythm section!


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song 068 : First of a New Breed (DNA + Outtakes)

I was going for a Roger Daltrey vocal in a full out classic rock mode but the point of the song is the desire to break free from the familiar. Ironic, oh yes!

“I don’t know what I want but I know what I am not” is a good place to start because you can’t change the world until you change yourself. Changing yourself changes the world.

But the song also captures the irony of rock and roll, now something more reenacted than pioneered, its burning torch for life a spark encased like insects in amber in the clichés of TV commercial hit song snippets.

In a way First of a New Breed is a portrait of rock’s ultimate impotence. The clock was turned back. The man with a plan proved stronger than the bands. But the song is also a reminder that the process of social evolution is far from over!


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song 067 : Kali (DNA + Outtakes)

The chimes were bought in an import shop in Little Tokyo. On our way there and back we walked by most of what Ronnie describes in the lyrics.

A pun on Cali but sincerely a hymn to the great Hindu mother goddess Kali, this song started as some riffs I was working on when Debbie left the band. I didn’t want to play them anymore but Ronnie liked them so much he wrote lyrics for them.

The refrain “grace and mercy in your wild hair” was inspired by Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess, a collection of Tantric poems to Kali by the great Hindu poet Ramprasad Sen.

Ronnie is a witchy lad indeed, although he doesn’t do ceremonies or covens. Honestly, he probably knows more about your religion than you do. He’s an encyclopedia of weird facts about history. His fellow pagans will enjoy knowing that Ronnie was born at 3:14 AM (pi) on the Feast of Artemis.


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song 066 : Night Prowler PCH (DNA + Outtakes)

Crime was a constant at Jabberjaw in Crenshaw. Friendships were born in the aftermath. One night when the PeeChees were playing two guys from San Pedro had their truck broken into, shattered glass everywhere. We waited with them for the police who, as we tried to flag them down, drove slowly by, laughing at us.

After Jabberjaw closed, the two guys from San Pedro opened a club in a bleak strip of warehouses along Pacific Coast Highway: PCH Club. The first time we were asked to play there we went down to check it out and to my shock I had a full blown panic attack, something that never happens to me. I was sure I was going to die in a car crash or assault any second.
Later that night after talking it over with a friend I figured it out. PCH Club and the area around it looked an awful lot like where I was taken in tenth grade when I was kidnapped, beaten, raped and nearly murdered. I was having a flashback.

The band wanted to cancel the show but I didn't want to. I think we were opening for Red Monkey from the UK. I decided I wanted to face this down. I wanted to use the fear, harness it to my performance, and be rid of at least some of it. I found the two creepiest predator songs I could to make into my revenge song.

"Night Prowler" by Bon Scott's AC/DC is known around SoCal as the Richard Ramirez song because it helped inspire the Hispanic satanic causing panic serial killer to call himself the Night Stalker. "Pacific Coast Highway" from Sonic Youth's Sister CD is a Kim Gordon song about a predator in a car. Given the club placement, it seemed magical. I began seeing what I was doing as a ritual.

The night of the show I wore a big black hoodie, when I sang Night Prowler PCH I pulled the hoodie over my head. It had silkscreened in white on the back of it the planet Earth and the words Terror Worldwide. When I put it on I thought of all the girls and women raped and murdered every day in the world.

At first as I sang it I was shaking and sweaty but as I began using the lyrics as my own words, as I imagined myself as the hunter, taking vengeance on a rapist, I began feeling an incredible amount of energy. By the end of the song I was relaxed, relieved, and happy even. People said I was glowing.


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song 065 : Coyote (DNA + Outtakes)

I live in the hills and coyotes are no fun to have around. They eat pet dogs and cats! They are capable of leaping tall fences in a single bound! They get in fights and whine like hyenas in the dead of night.

But coyotes have always been a southwestern symbol of wisdom. You can’t help but admire their skills and independence. Coyote is also a nickname for Mexicans skilled at illegal boarder crossing.

Grit had the music written on bass. Ronnie came up with that little Mick Ronson-ish bend in the verse hook and the song practically wrote itself. His lick reminded me of a tip toeing coyote. Grit being one of the great loners, and being a loner myself, I wrote the words for all loners wandering under the stars.


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song 064 : Bleed (DNA + Outtakes)

Revenge is best served surf rock! This track shows off Tia Sprocket’s explosive drumming. Several critics were offended by the lyrics, and one dismissed the song as masochism. I have no do doubt he has met or will meet his own version of the fictional little lady I described.

“Never trust a mammal that can bleed six days and live” is a common cry of the misogynist; here it’s the battle cry of a woman who escapes an abusive relationship. But before she goes there’s some pain to be returned.

The lines “Sidewalk shadows stream, I’m thinking about god, somewhere down the street, the barking of a dog” are Ronnie’s contribution. They come from a Cat Cult song you’ll hear near the end of the Hundred Song March. I think he meant it literally, but when I sang “barking of a dog” I was picturing a guy yelling after the girl who got away.

I’m not advocating revenge. In fact, I think sometimes women do these things reactively, instinctively, because human beings are simple that way. Pain in equals pain out.


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song 063 : L.A. River (DNA + Outtakes)

The return of Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn adds an extra dimension to this song about the psychological suspension that is Los Angeles. “Butane sunrise skyline” is one of my favorite lyrics: if you’ve ever seen a clear morning in L.A. it really does have the colors of butane flame. “Magenta nectarine in a puddle of gasoline” ain’t bad either!

The line “every breath is a turn around a corner” is my contribution to the lyrics. Debbie Haliday’s sister gave Ronnie the line “coats of a thousand screams.” When Ronnie’s solo gears up after the last chorus check out his salute to Gimme Danger by Iggy and the Stooges.

Back in the day of the original Iggy and the Stooges, Nitebob (who mixed this track with Mike Barile) was their sound man, road manager, and general nanny. Nitebob played L.A. River for Keith Richards who pronounced it “marvelous.”


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song 062 : Pimpin' (DNA + Outtakes)

Anyone who has spent any time in Los Angeles has probably overheard or been on the receiving end of one of these monologues. Hollywood is the land of the hustle. This vocal was one hundred percent improvised.

I think it was really witty of The Orchard to make Pimpin’ the lead track for their first SXSW compilation. I was happy we got to insult everyone at the corporate feeding trough without actually attending!


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song 061 : Natural Selection (DNA + Outtakes)

“2000 and it’s still too slow” I sang to start DNA. Man, and I thought it was bad then! I never imagined how far the clock could be turned back. Did Superman go Republican on us and start spinning the Earth backwards or what?

I believe songs are invisible creatures that exist out there in the air until someone provides the right set of circumstances. The freestyle recording experiments we do, beginning with the next episode of the Hundred Song March, are an exploration, or a test, of that process.

I don’t like every song that decided to find your ears through my voice. But I’ve learned I’m usually wrong about what people will like. I’ve never liked this song but it’s one of our most popular.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 060 : Blue Moon (outtake) (DNA + Outtakes)

I really hated this song. But I hate all my la-la songs. I’ve learned that my audience has completely different taste than I do. I don’t pander to them, but now I’m more open to allowing a song to live even when I don’t particularly like it!

In 2005 Blue Moon was emailed among a group of survivors of hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, the Crescent City. Most people thought I wrote the song just after it happened but really it was five years old.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 059 : Naked Lunch (outtake) (DNA + Outtakes)

Danette Lee had the music. Ronnie came up with the lyrics at the studio and threw down a vocal. The romantic betrayal theme gets a weird twist from his William Burroughs inspired chorus.

If you like William Burroughs, or if you haven’t read him yet, and you are a cat lover, please read his book The Cat Inside.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 058 : First of a New Breed (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

We were going for a Who meets Led Zeppelin thing, in this probably our most shameless exploration of classic rock.

By the time we released DNA the peace punk scene had begun to disappear. The original Koo’s location of so many fabled shows was closed down. Anarchy punk took a more violent turn. Many of the great leaders of the peace punk scene found new ways to live their principles.

People who thought that American Stonehenge was a step down from The Stillness of Over were completely annoyed when we served up this platter of primo butt rock! But once again we found a new audience: post grunge and stoner rock kids.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 057 : Pimpin' (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

I love the DNA CD version of this song, but Nitebob and Mr. Barile did dress it up like it was going trick or treating! Here’s the song in its naked simplicity.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 056 : L.A. River (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

This is the only version of this song to include both tracks of Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn’s spoken word.

The NYC mixes left out some of Danette’s subtle guitar parts. I remember arguing with Nitebob and Mike Barile about that.

“Running out of time, running out of money” the big boys would protest and hush us out the door so they could get back to work.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 055 : Night Prowler (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

As usual we ran out of budget while mixing DNA in NYC. Our recordings have always been done on shoestring budgets. The Stillness of Over cost about 800 bucks. The most we ever spent on a record was ten thousand for Tacoma Ballet and that included ten days in a hotel plus meals!

But not having enough budget makes for imperfections and omissions, and I’m still miffed that Nitebob and Mr. Barile didn’t include Danette’s ascending riffs and leads in the DNA mix. To my ear the track sounds empty without those parts. You can compare in a few days when we reach the DNA mix of this song (which has some other qualities I like a lot).

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 054 : Coyote (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

When Neil Perry was mixing these songs for Artemis, Danny Goldberg once asked me which song I though was the single. That was a damn good question because none of the songs fit into commercial radio formats. None of us could agree on a song. Ronnie said we should look for omens.

Late that night I woke up to the sound of something big scrambling down the hill behind my house. I peeked through the blind and in my little back garden a coyote was nuzzling around sampling scents.

That was good enough for me. I wonder if the deal had gone through with Artemis, and if Danny’s crack radio team had worked the song, would some stations like KROQ have let this odd track slip past their formats and onto the air? I doubt it!

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 053 : Natural Selection (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

Natural Selection isn’t just a snide marketing phrase for a radio hit single title; it’s the restless reality of evolution stirring in the hearts of human beings. Rock and roll (including all its bastard children from punk through hip hop to deep house) is march music for the naturally selected (hence the Hundred Song March).

I really love the guitar tones Ronnie and Danette got. Danette was using her Richenbacher through a solid state Marshall. Ronnie used some borrowed guitars including a sixties vintage Les Paul, a sixties vintage Stratocaster, and a 1964 Firebird through a vintage fawn top boost Vox AC-30, and a fifties Fender Deluxe tweed.

Grit used her Galien Kruger rig augmented with various inventions. Tia had an oversized Gretsch kit featuring a rental snare drum known as The Terminator that was played on Nirvana’s Teen Spirit and many other famous songs.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 052 : GKM (Naked DNA) (DNA + Outtakes)

This is the closest thing to hearing this line up of Lucid Nation live. The following seven rough mixes are unvarnished: no dubs, no effects or mastering. This is what we sounded like in rehearsal.

Some people prefer these mixes to the slicker NYC mixes we used on the DNA CD. Tia Sprocket thinks we released the wrong mixes and on a couple of songs I’m inclined to agree.

This mix is missing a Kerouac inspired spoken word part you’ll hear at the end of GKM on the DNA CD, coming up in about a week.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 051 : Escapabilities (outtake) (American Stonehenge)

Erin’s girl power anthem inspired me to try drumming. Unfortunately I could never get both arms working so I had to do an unintentional Tommy Lee pointing thing with my left stick!

We left Erin at the hotel next to the airport in Jersey and drove through the tunnel into New York City on our way to our meeting with Tia Sprocket, then playing with Luscious Jackson. We were on the threshold of a third new world for Lucid Nation to explore.

NEXT: LUCID NATION DNA INCLUDING OUT TAKES

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 050 : Dad (live on KSPC) (American Stonehenge)

We were invited to play this show at KSPC, a great alternative station at Claremont College, as an afternoon warm up to opening for Tribe 8 that night. This version of Dad shows off the different feel Erin brought to the song, and the new hostility I brought to singing it.

It’s not like I never played the solo before. The song was just so new to me! Actually we lived so far from each other when we met half way for rehearsal it meant an hour drive to the LBC and a room in an industrial park a couple blocks from a refinery. Consequently, we didn’t rehearse much.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 049 : I Beat The Smart Kids (American Stonehenge)

Near the end of our national tour Erin left Lucid Nation. Our last show together was at The Black Cat in Washington D.C. on Father’s Day, a show that culminated when Erin and Free Verse confronted Ronnie for not moving enough of the gear (even though he was road managing the whole tour).

I was pissed that Erin decided to fly home the next day, sure, but I understood. All I had to do was think back to the night we opened for Hazel at the Showcase Theater a couple years earlier. Erin had to sneak out her window to play drums at the gig; she was sixteen years old and grounded. Her tour of duty with us was epic for a kid who had just turned eighteen when it ended.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 048 : Cyclical Insomnia (American Stonehenge)

“What could be more innocent than thirsting for innocence?”
“Does your windshield make a TV out of everything you see?”
“Are you all safe and warm in your emotional aquarium?”
“How do you have the demons removed other people forced on you?”
Those four questions tell a story that is quite chilling.

To end it Ronnie skids out in a lyrical ramble about a switch he wants to flip to change the world back (accompanied by a blatantly psychedelic blend of guitar destruction and acoustic pickery).

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 047 : Dumped (American Stonehenge)

Thurston Moore called us “smokin’ but we learned that without the certification of the right label and publicist, invisibility constantly threatens. In fact, a few years later when our Tacoma Ballet CD hit #1 on national college radio no one knew because we didn’t hire a publicist. How could we? We didn’t know about it ourselves until months later!

Riot grrrl had been hip and it was easy for us to get write ups but peace punk was not and what little media attention we had was gone. In the back of my mind when I wrote this song were thoughts of all the people who had said they were friends, the writers who had praised me, the DJs who had played me, they were all gone.

Later I got a letter from a girl who told me the song saved her life when she was feeling suicidal after being dumped. Since then I’ve gotten other letters like that, they are a big reason why I keep making music.

I think this is my best guitar solo; it’s actually three combined solos, check out the Hammond organ-like overtones I got!

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 046 : Music Saved My Ass Again (American Stonehenge)

Ronnie’s song about finding renewal (and revenge) in music was a minor college radio hit that drew comparisons to the Raw Power record by Iggy and the Stooges. But any real punk will recognize the Fear power chords in the chorus.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 045 : That's How They Get You (American Stonehenge)

My friend and drummer Debbie gone, Erin shaky at best, no new drummer on the horizon, I contemplated the unsavory prospect of continuing my career as a musician. The song lapses into silence after the repeated scream: “Why should I trust you or me?” I was a few weeks from bedridden sick and feeling weaker by the day.

People had been fucking with me going all the way back to mom. Could I ever heal the damage? Or would I keep repeating with my band the abandonment I first experienced with my family? A few months later, Erin dumped us near the end of our national tour.

But crazy Ronnie turned out to be constant and resourceful. And despite the despair of the moment captured by this song the story of Lucid Nation was just getting started. Amazing musicians, adventures, and songs waited just over the horizon.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 044 : Them Too (American Stonehenge)

Erin liked this song from The Stillness of Over so much she insisted we record it with her. Ronnie tweaked the lyrics and arrangement a little. I like his new line: “fuck you for enjoying falling on us who haven’t given up yet.” The line “should I masturbate or mutilate?” was my contribution. I’ve always admired him for having the balls to sing that cuz I never would.

Playing this song in front of riot grrrls I thought it was about adolescent rebellion and the healthy human drive to criticize and transcend an oppressive status quo. But now with Black Panthers at our shows I could see the song from the point of view of racism. “I never was what you made me” took on a whole new meaning.

You see, the Panthers had marched into Koo’s one matinee. OC punks confronted OG Panthers. Sharrif Abdullah, who had been the minister of defense for the Panthers since the late Seventies, stood in front of the crowd and asked anyone who believed the Panthers were pro-violence and anti-white to raise a hand. No hands were raised.

Sharrif was a bit pissed off by this. He took the time to look every one of us right in the eyes. I watched the expression on his face change as he realized we had not snidely lied or chickened out. “I want to thank you for giving me an experience that is one of the highlights of my life as a revolutionary,” he quietly said with a smile.

Man, was I proud sporting my gang truce t-shirt hot off the Panther silkscreen! You see, though I’m a blond cracker by appearance, I have the occasional nappy hair to prove that Victoria Spivey was a distant relation.

Victoria was a black blues singer and the first woman to own an independent record label. She was an old woman when she became one of the earliest to record Bob Dylan. I knew nothing about her until I had several CDs to my credit, but listening to her gruff blues shout and salty lyrics I felt like I was coming home to the arms of the mother I never knew!

The Panthers gave The Stillness of Over a positive review in their newspaper. The leader of the New African Vanguard contributed to a zine Sisi of Revolution Rising, Ronnie, and I were doing called Eracism. The Panthers helped make thousands of copies which were distributed to gang truce centers and prisons all over the western United States.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 043 : Spins (American Stonehenge)

Know anybody so smart they never do anything? They can give you a hundred reasons why anything anyone could do is hopeless, ridiculous, senseless, or dangerous. I was wrestling with the idea that there was no future for me making music. The one thing I didn’t want to do is see any more of my life go down the drain.

It’s like vertigo when you contemplate that all your efforts will forever disappear. Of course, they will anyway ultimately but I wasn’t ready for immediate invisibility. It had been a terrible struggle for me to regain the courage to speak let alone the desire to be noticed. They had been taken away from me by a violent criminal when I was in tenth grade as you’ll see in the next section of the Hundred Song March.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 042 : Squeaky Steps (American Stonehenge)

ome of Erin’s lyrics are about her friendship with Joey Karam (long before he joined The Locust). Back then Joey was at KUCI radio and he promoted great shows. Thanks to him we got to open for bands like Jejune and Joan of Arc.

But these songs also capture Erin’s disillusionment with riot grrrl. What do you expect when you throw a bunch of abuse survivors in a scene together and tell them to do what they want? Abuse in/abuse out, it’s that simple, and a supposedly safe space is the perfect place for acting out.

I think our mutual disillusionment with riot grrrl bonded us, despite our respect for the liberation it gave us we could see it was not the wildfire about to torch the prairie of worldwide girldom we had hoped for; it was going to burn out and leave few sparks.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 041 : Food Chain (American Stonehenge)

This song is Ronnie’s portrait of a certain type of parasite we encountered in every scene we played: riot grrrl, peace punk, hemp rallies, you could usually count on one of these creepss handling some illegal niche, pun intended.

On our first national tour when we swung through L.A. a creep like that picked on me not realizing I was in the band. I called him out from the stage. It turned out he had tried to rape girls he offered rides home.

At the end of Food Chain, Ronnie’s Patti Smith inclinations run amok in the closing section where it becomes obvious a favorite record of his is Radio Ethiopia.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 040 : Redundant (American Stonehenge)

Even though I understood why Debbie left and I wanted her to be safe, some uncontrollable and primitive part of me felt betrayed. She was someone I had looked up to. One of my best friends had vanished completely from my life.

Near the end, she would lapse into long silences. A few times she simply stopped playing and sat with her head hung. The drives home were excruciating and I dreaded the silence.

I never really became friends with Erin. We all understood she was a temp and we all knew it dragged out too long. But I really enjoyed hanging out with Erin and friends of hers like Ashley.

Ashley was quiet; and very stylish in a Fifties or perhaps Forties way. She would sit with her back on Erin’s kick drum at our shows so the drum wouldn’t move. Fearlessly she stared down the audience: sometimes melancholy with unspoken knowledge, sometimes glaring as if to emphasize the message of an angry song. Her rare smile would charm.

I don’t know if Ashley and I ever talked for more than a couple minutes. I remember us all sitting quietly on the grass before a gig at The Library. The silence was so comfortable.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 039 : Privilege (American Stonehenge)

Once we started playing Koo’s and other Food Not Bombs events we were drafted into kitchen duty. That winter L.A. suffered a long and heavy rain storm. The City of Santa Monica was known for maintaining decent shelters and homeless people from all across southern California headed for them. But all the shelters were suddenly closed down and the homeless were left to fend for themselves.

Food Not Bombs had their eye on an abandoned hotel in Santa Monica called The Pink Flamingo. You can only imagine how sleek the place must have looked when it opened in the fifties. In the Seventies the lagoon pool must have been a hot spot after midnight. But now it was a fenced off pile.

Food Not Bombs had found a provision in the nether regions of the city charter or code that they believed gave them the legal right to turn an unused building like the Flamingo into a temporary shelter. So they cut the chain link fence and the homeless streamed in.

People from all over town brought food; supplies were handed through the cut fence. The cops surrounded the perimeter and did what they could to legally intimidate while in offices lawyers haggled.

The fights that broke out inside, often between people with mental issues, or drug and alcohol problems, were dangerous and hard to manage. The tension between the runaway punk kids and the borderline criminals and veterans of the street occupying the upper levels was tangible.

Someone decided a band should be brought in to do an acoustic set to lift everyone’s spirits. They called Lucid Nation. So we found ourselves trudging through the cold night trying to avoid cops on a dirt back road where you could drop bodies.

We pulled our guitars through the tear in the chain link fence and surveyed a scene like something out of a Mad Max movie. Flashlights were shining down at us from balconies overhead where veterans of the street whistled and cat called.

First we were ushered into the graffitied rooms of what had been a pool side suite. It was packed with runaway kids. One had already been wounded in battle with street scavengers, and everyone was expecting more trouble.

We were led down into a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Zine tables and arguing scholars like sculptures: the leaders of the occupation, in a downstairs hall where, thanks to the vibrations caused by their voices and footsteps, the asbestos ceiling was crumbling like a slow and fine snow. We didn’t play.

A few hours after we left, late in the night, the police stormed the place. No one was badly injured but there were beatings and Food Not Bombs people went to jail. Ronnie wrote this song soon after. For three months it was Scour.com’s #2 most downloaded punk MP3 worldwide.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 038 : Chainletter (American Stonehenge)

Was I singing to riot grrrl or to Debbie or to anonymous snipers on message boards? I was singing to them all and to others including my family.

Speaking of Chainsaw one of the first shows we played on our national tour was in Olympia at the Capitol Theater. We tried to play with Witchy Poo whenever we were up there because Slim Moon would always think of something unexpected to do and seemed to appreciate it when we were the only ones laughing.

After we arrived during sound check my Stratocaster died. I didn’t know it had active pick ups that needed batteries. When we figured it out Ronnie pulled all the strings off it, handed it to me, and just before running down the street to buy some nine volts asked me to take the screws out.

I wasn’t really sure what screws he meant. So in the nervous tension of the beginning of the tour I sat at dusk in the parking lot and removed every single goddamn screw from that guitar!

When Ronnie came back he was as helpless as I was in front of the disconnected mess. (Did I do something bad?) I’ll never forget the voice of Chainsaw Records honcho Donna Dresch asking us what was up. Donna had that guitar back together so fast it was like she waved a magic wand over it!

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 037 : This is for all the nights you sent me driving home to an empty house full of people (American Stonehenge)

Erin was responsible for one of my favorite touring moments. She pulled up at a red light in a dry city in Arkansas. A horrendous brick monolith faced us.
“What is that?” Erin asked, playing with her nose ring, which usually indicated trouble.
“A retirement home,” Ronnie read the sign.

Erin’s shout of “Satan” was so loud you could hear it echoing down the long flat blocks. We all laughed so hard we almost forgot the twelve hour drive getting there. Some of the kids who opened for us ended up in Olympia in a band called The Gossip. Nathan, I’m glad you hoodwinked us into playing that show.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 036 : Rattlesnake (American Stonehenge)

I wrote this song for a Food Not Bombs compilation to benefit the Dineh (Navaho) Save Big Mountain movement. We played benefits for Ward Valley, too. My great (I don’t know how many times) grandfather was a Cherokee chief on the Trail of Tears. I own a fringe shirt made out of an American flag cut and sewn during the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Smoke on that peace pipe, my cracker friends!

What a horrible year. It began with the death of two of my friends. Next was a virus that floored me for ten weeks. Then an abortion. I didn’t feel strong enough to attempt our national tour with Free Verse, the all girl Lawrence, Kansas hardcore band I had signed to my new label Brain Floss Records. But I did it anyway. Erin caught a cold right off and of course I got it. I spent most of the tour sick in the back seat of the van.

At the end of the tour Ronnie and I had to drive the minivan full of drums and amps from Vermont to Seattle. We found ourselves in South Dakota on the Fourth of July. In the morning I followed a trail of dandelions to a museum.

While I wandered, the great granddaughter of Chief Red Cloud quietly wove a quill bracelet while conversing with Ronnie, then gave it to him along with a standing invitation to visit the reservation.

That afternoon we visited Bear Butte where Chief Crazy Horse loved to meditate and pray. We hadn’t realized there would be Sioux there, duh. We were the only whiteys but no one bothered about us. We climbed onto the butte and watched a thunderstorm play across the plains. I left some of my hair as a prayer flag; and collected sage that fell out of a medicine man’s basket as I walked the path behind him.

That night we drove the freeway in the thunderstorm. I’ve never seen anything like it. Two thunderstorms were approaching each other and the lightning was flashing in vivid hues of blue and red. It looked like we were driving right into the impact where the storms would meet but the freeway veered a little south.

We slowed down in the pouring rain to watch the two storms collide on rolling grassy hills lit up green in the bright flashes. Then I saw the sign. The storms had met on the Little Big Horn. It still gives me chills.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 035 : Television (American Stonehenge)

Putting this song first on American Stonehenge may not have been such a good idea. The song was misinterpreted as a pop sell out. Add Erin’s penchant for acoustic guitars and pensive Celtic moods and it seemed when Debbie left she took the experimental thunder with her.

Ronnie wrote this threatening yet romantic song after encountering the book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. It’s a Situationist love song! (Search “situationism” if you don’t know what it means, you’ll be glad you did.)

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 034 : Resist Psychic Death (outtake)

Our cover of the Bikini Kill classic hopefully captures a little of the inspiration they gave us. They blazed a trail. They changed thousands of lives. Bikini Kill and Team Dresch were bright noisy lights in the silent night of girl rock. For those who weren’t there it’s almost impossible to describe the atmosphere of liberation at those shows. Females felt empowered to create bands and live out other visions.

Every girl should sing her favorite Bikini Kill song with a band at least once. Erin and I agreed we wanted to sing this one. Pinky promise!

PS there is a glitch like a skip in this recording; it’s not a faulty file or your player. Riot grrrl means never having to record correctly!


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 033 : Last Peach on the Tree (Debbie’s last rehearsal)

This was the last recording by the original Lucid Nation. At the time we rehearsed in a converted garage. We shared it with bands that played there infrequently so we felt like it was ours. In the backyard were peach trees. All that summer we feasted on the warm ripe peaches. But then when the days grew shorter, the peaches were gone.

Ronnie’s last song for the original Lucid Nation always reminds me of that street of stucco houses, lying on our backs in sunshine soaked grass, the cinder block walls which stayed cool the longest, and the peach trees pinned against sunset, their leaves black with the soot of descending planes.

You can hear how reluctant Debbie was to play as she slows down to a funereal four four. She didn't disappear. She told us she was going home. She was even at Nick Romero's first rehearsal. But then she was gone, and it was winter.

We heard months later from Donna Dresch that she saw Debbie on the train in Washington state. Donna thought Debbie was seething with anger, so much so, she didn't dare say hi though she considered her a friend. It still makes me sad when I think about that because Debbie was alone out there and we were her band.

I was a dipstick then. I hadn't yet studied martial arts. I was ridiculously naive for someone who had been dragged through the gutter. If only I could have been then who I am now. I see now how the door was open to our success but no one was there to guide us and all three of us were too traumatized to realize.

Would I trade the Lucid Nation that happened instead for the one that might have been with Debbie? Would I trade the famous female musicians I've had the privilege of playing with? The series of happy accidents that put me on the cutting edge of integrity? Yes.

Ronnie and I later recorded a scratch version of this song for his brief return to Cat Cult, his own project. The title changed to Mourn, and the song became a eulogy for the painter Conrad Santavicca. More on that near the end of the Hundred Song March, when we explore Cat Cult: the roots of Lucid Nation.

EPISODE ONE: THE END

TOMORROW! EPISODE TWO: AMERICAN STONEHENGE


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 032 : Snowblind

I was going to sing this for a compilation of Black Sabbath covers by female fronted bands. This was the first time we played it. Some people hear an odd overtone on this track and other recordings we made around then. They compare it to the sound of a piano pounding out chords.

We first noticed it when we used to rehearse in a building that was over 150 years old. We'd be peacefully rehearsing. Suddenly the room got cold and the dark somehow felt darker. A skin tingling eerie feeling what come over us all at the same time. I hated going to the bathroom there, the place felt like a horror movie waiting to happen.

Listening to rehearsal tapes, hearing piano overtones, we joked that we had picked up an ivory tickler. Whoever this ghostly piano player was he must have liked Debbie because while he did follow us to other rehearsal spaces, the overtones stopped when she left the band.

Since Debbie was related to Doc Holiday I used to say maybe the piano player was the ghost of a Tombstone saloon man come out west. Maybe he died in that dreary building twenty miles north of the Pueblo of the City of Our Lady of the Angels, which even then had long known the nickname Devil's Town.


Listen to the song: Click Here

song 031 : Wanderlust at Dusk (Debbie’s last rehearsal)

We now approach the end of episode one of the Hundred Song March. The following three instrumentals are a peek at what would have been the next Lucid Nation CD with Debbie Haliday. They were recorded at Debbie's last rehearsal with us.

Wanderlust at Dusk was going to be a song about the moment when, despite the hectic demands of work and gridlock, a human being glimpses the peaceful invitations of nature, a reminder of the whole world out there, the almost unlimited opportunities lost in the day to day grind. Everybody wants to walk away into the unknown sometimes.

This was the final song I wrote for the original Lucid Nation. I never used these riffs again.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 030 : Youth Against Fascism (live at Brick by Brick) (The Stillness of Over)

Live at Brick by Brick in San Diego, during the Republican National Convention at an anti-censorship show, opening for former MC5 manager and White Panther jazz poet John Sinclair. John was much taken with our freestyle approach.

Nick Romero was drummer for popular L.A. punk band The Limeys. He stepped in when Debbie left so we could keep playing shows; many of them at the lost all ages club The Impala in Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles, where we first started experimenting with full on freestyle 100% improvisation.

Nick’s friend, Yves Lelevier, now guitarist for Kennedy, sometimes played gigs with us. Since he was under eighteen and otherwise wouldn't be allowed inside, the best way to get him in was by putting him on stage! For this show Yves loaned Ronnie his gun metal gray Clapton Strat. Listen to that throaty tone through Ronnie's vintage 100 watt Marshall!

Including this song on The Stillness of Over was our way of saying that Lucid Nation would go on.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 029 : Broken (The Stillness of Over)

Debbie’s goodbye to Lucid Nation and Los Angeles. Why did Debbie leave? Was it because she was so disgusted with scene politics? Was it because a gang member was shot dead at the front door to her apartment building?

Was it because her own apartment was ransacked, her gun stolen, her twisted tiara left on her pillow like a threat? I asked her to move in with me. But she was done with Los Angeles. Last I heard, a few years ago, she was married to a soldier headed to Iraq. She regretted giving up music. I don't know where Debbie is or what she is doing now. Here are her lyrics for Broken.

"Everything's fine behind rose-colored glasses
I'm telling lies but it really don't matter
dreaming of rainbows and days never ending
blueberry pies and really great weekends

car alarms, helicopters, and crack
sirens scream, drunkards dream and crack
drive bys, gangs, spies and crack
traffic lights, moonless nights, and crack
cats wail, christ failed, and crack
phone calls, shopping malls, and crack
prostitution, arrested youth, and crack
politics makes me sick and crack

blueberry pies and lemon popovers
dead or alive I'm living in clover
this is what happens to boys and girls
or hadn't you heard?

everything is fine
I had a dream
fear and lies
what the hell is wrong with me?
my dream: you're here
no fear, no lies
don't cry, I'll try
goodbye my dreams
everything is fine
what was it this meant?"

Debbie wasn't into the drug crack, she was really talking about her broken heart. This is the only recording of Debbie on guitar and of Ronnie on drums.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 028 : Fortunate Punk (live at The Jabberjaw) (The Stillness of Over)

I twisted the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic into a punk song about how it feels to be a girl in a world that loves war and mosh pits. For a bridge I threw in the chorus of an obscure Nirvana song called Opinion.

The Jabberjaw was a notorious all ages club in the dangerous Crenshaw district of Los Angeles where bands like Nirvana, Hole, Sleater Kinney and Rage against the Machine started. Lucid Nation’s first release, a tape demo with a lime green label and glitter stickers, was for sale in the Jabberjaw glass case just before the club was closed down forever by a fire code technicality.

The war against all ages venues in America has all but destroyed what was once a vital and viral scene. You'd think that the record companies and musical instrument manufacturers would have the brains to realize that by supporting a network of all ages venues they would sell more records to kids and encourage more kids to create great bands. Instead rock is cut off at the root.

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song 027 : Angry Pelicans (rehearsal) (The Stillness of Over)

Recorded by a local bootlegger who boasted one of the world’s best collections of Nirvana shows (and a huge crush on Debbie). Angry Pelicans was Debbie’s nickname for Republicans. She also reveals the street kid trick she used to keep away predators on the sidewalks of Hollywood.

Debbie played a 1965 blue glitter Ludwig gold key Ringo Starr kit. Her dad was a drummer. When she was little she'd point at Animal drumming and say that's me. Besides knowing her away around L.A. better than us natives, Debbie had all sorts of useful knowledge from homespun remedies to psychological quirks of the dominator culture.

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song 026 : The Sun Doesn’t Rise in the Slaughterhouse (The Stillness of Over)

his track is the board mix from the night we opened for Bikini Kill, FYP, Mike Watt’s Dos, and Emily Sassy Lime at Terrazza Jamay in East L.A., our third or fourth gig. Since we were the opening band I was up on stage with my back to the audience setting up amps and pedals before anybody else was there but the sound men (and Mike Watt and Kira).

Somebody asked me if they could borrow my screwdriver. I was so excited I almost blurted out "Omigod I can't believe I'm about to meet Kathleen Hannah" when I realized it was her. When she complimented the tool set I gave it to her not realizing until later it had one of my late father's screwdrivers in it, one of the few things I had from him.

fter helping Debbie set up her drums I turned to see hundreds of people standing in what had been a huge empty room. We played well. I didn't realize till much later that L.A. was ours. KXLU played us. Sonic Youth invited us to their sound check at the Palladium where Ronnie sat on the far left and I sat on the far right of the floor while Kathleen sat in the center. They sounded so good. Maybe the best live band I ever heard, on one of those sound check songs. Danny Goldberg wanted to talk to us.

But we had no clue we could have parlayed all that into success. Our heads were full of post riot grrrl isolationism and our hearts were heavy with the troubles of our jobless, sickness-surrounded lives.

After Debbie left listening to this track I realized I had to start Brain Floss Records. I had to make sure somehow that Debbie's genius didn't disappear forever. I'm glad to report that this song still changes lives.

Mastered by Jack Endino.
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song 025 : Grounded (The Stillness of Over)

had the music before I met Debbie. Debbie had written the lyrics as a poem before she met me. They fit perfectly together. We thought it was a sign.

It's one of the best things about being in a band, or any kind of creativity really, the way at times the universe seems to support what you are doing with ridiculously appropriate and useful coincidences. Zine writers know this phenomena, the way the perfect illustration or quotation will fall into your hands. As you'll see when the Hundred Song March reaches our Suburban Legends, Nonpoetic Rain: Live on KXLU, and Tacoma Ballet recordings, love of synchronicity eventually led us to record entire albums in a freestyle dare to create real songs on the spot out of thin air.

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song 024 : Trip (The Stillness of Over)

Ronnie’s song about touring the West Coast for the first time was popular with other bands who discovered for themselves how accurately he captured their feelings: the spacey disassociation of constant driving, the draining fatigue, the unexpected epiphanies of beauty and inspiration. But this song is also Ronnie’s diary note for a moment of clarity sparked by riot grrrl.

Of course, he left out charming moments like the truck stop gas station at 4 A.M. at the very end of the tour when Debbie at the wheel interrupted our bickering at the gas pump by growling "get in the truck now!" The whole front of our white Mitsubishi Mighty Max was black with the bodies of grasshoppers smashed as we drove through a swarm on the freeway.

As that tour began, on the way up to Portland, we found ourselves in a long stretch of forest stuck a few cars behind a Forest Ranger’s slow pick up truck with a cherry light flashing and a big lit up sign warning danger ahead stay behind. Debbie stepped on it and swung across lanes, zooming past the shocked Ranger. She tore down that mountain road so fast I was hanging on like I was on the Titanic!

We never encountered a dangerous obstacle or any police fortunately, but thanks to her we did arrive at the break of day at a beautiful meadow with clouds touching it and sun rays dazzling the dew. I saw a majestic vulture on a nearby rock warming her wings in the new daylight, while a local station played The Doors and Jim warned us not to waste the dawn.

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song 023 : Happy (The Stillness of Over)

I like the way John Lennon played with words, especially his puns and gender shifts; this song was my first experiment with that.

I had noticed the way potential breakthrough movements in social consciousness like riot grrrl always collapse into mammalian politics, what Cobain called territorial pissings. Ultimately somebody emerges as daddy and somebody else gets to be the loser, and so on. Everything good about the scene dies soon after as the stereotypes play themselves out.

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song 022 : Penetration (The Stillness of Over)

When we first met, Debbie had an abusive boyfriend. After she kicked him out, he came back one last time to yell at her for, among other things, daring to think she could be a drummer. He reminded her that with all his professional bands and friendships with rock stars, he had never even been on the radio.

Well, the Great Goddess of Rock and Roll smiled upon Debbie that day for at that exact moment KXLU played this track. Debbie heard herself on the radio for the first time but not the last. Today this song and others with so called obscene content are supposed to be banned from college radio thanks to rules imposed by the FCC.

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song 021 : Them (The Stillness of Over)

A rebel yell for people living lives forced on them, Them was the first song Ronnie wrote with Lucid Nation. We could barely play it at first! I have cassette tapes of our hilariously inept beginnings.

Ronnie writes about the struggle to be authentic when society (and most families) try to reduce everyone to interchangeable pieces. I guess not being allowed to be you would have special significance for a kid whose family was almost wiped out in the Holocaust.

Fans of black and white science fiction classics will immediately be reminded of giant ants not just by the title this song shares with the movie, but by the guitar feedback Ronnie lays across the track in imitation of their sound.

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song 020 : Landmark (The Stillness of Over)

One of the weirdest things about being in Lucid Nation was going through a stretch where the west coast riot grrrl infantry decided to make war on us with snippy anonymous message board insults, mass walk outs, false accusations, and other colorful reminders of Salem. But their generals (Kaia, Jody, Donna, Melissa, Jean and David, Madigan, Phranc) never stopped being our friends.

One of the weirdest things about being in Lucid Nation was going through a stretch where some of the west coast riot grrrl infantry decided to make war on us with snippy anonymous message board insults, mass walk outs, false accusations, and other colorful reminders of Salem. The musicians they looked up to continued to be our friends. You'd think the grrrls might have noticed that people they respected thought we were worthwhile.

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song 019 : Dad (The Stillness of Over)

This was one of Lucid Nation’s biggest college radio hits. CMJ #8 most added, it got played on over 350 stations. It’s also the first song I ever wrote!

When the European television network ARTE chose me as one of three influential young underground female artists they filmed Lucid Nation performing this song thirteen times in a row! That’s definitely my endurance record for screaming goddamnit at the top of my lungs.

I got an email from a musician who got busted for drugs in Texas. He was serving time. He said the black inmates spent hours swapping rhymes. They bugged him until he rapped the only thing he could think of: Dad. They liked it so much they rapped it back at him upon his release.

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song 018 : Syndrome (The Stillness of Over)

Are you ready for better quality recordings? Welcome to The Stillness of Over, the first Lucid Nation CD.

The next eight songs were recorded on 2” 24 track at Big Scary Tree in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, a hell hole of a studio with a great sound just around the corner from where Al’s Bar used to be. Most were later mastered by Jack Endino of Nirvana fame for Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation.

Big Scary Tree is a weird place. In the back, up rickety stairs like ladders, are several rooms like hobbit holes, constructed of 2 by 4’s, a cluster of rented flops inhabited by mysterious musicians and artists. The place was always freezing cold and you could expect the electricity to blow out at least once a session. To make it even more fun, we didn't have enough budget to go back and fix mistakes!

But I enjoyed being within walking distance of Little Tokyo. The shops had lots of Hello Kitty and other fun stuff, and the blocks of small family run restaurants were a good place to hash out the next stage of recording over some hot miso and brown rice.

Syndrome was the theme song for a NYC public access sk8 show in 1999, and for a ho boarding DVD by Cocaine Crazy Productions in 2006.

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song 017 : Cut and Paste (Living Room Show)

Recorded in an apartment with an old Teac 80-8 eight track reel to reel, this cut and paste experiment was inspired by the writing of William Burroughs.

Ronnie’s text is composed of random snips from a variety of books. I read the ads in the back of the L.A. Weekly. Debbie threw in random words in Spanish. We all strummed and banged away on a variety of instruments.

Our goal was to capture the terrifying disassociation (underneath a torrent of disconnected thoughts) experienced by abuse survivors; and how the constant sales pitch of the media invades it.

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song 016 : Penetration (rehearsal)

When I first met Debbie she was a dancer. She had a huge canvas in her apartment on which she had painted skull-like ghostly figures that seemed to emerge like smoke from the canvas. Painting these skulls, she explained, was how she captured the souls of the men who watched her.

I was really impressed. She was impressed that I was learning to play bass and guitar. We had no idea there was any such thing as riot grrrl even though it was in full swing. Thanks to the band Girl Jesus and the art collective Revolution Rising our eyes were opened. For me Penetration captures the transformation from clueless victim to aware artist as well as any song I’ve heard. Debbie articulates the before and after with equal precision.

Over time Debbie began to feel like she shouldn’t preach. She felt like the problems she was describing were so monstrous no hope was possible and that her anthems for social evolution were actually laughably naive. You’ll hear the irony in her voice at the end of this track on The Stillness of Over CD soon. But at this rehearsal Debbie still meant it.

Happy Birthday, Debbie, where ever you are!

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song 015 : Dad (rehearsal)

This version of “Dad” features a more relaxed groove. Imagine sitting on the couch in our rehearsal garage in Van Nuys. It was surprisingly clean! We'd take breaks and lay out on the grass in the backyard watching planes glittering in the sun as they descended toward Burbank airport.

We were playing all over, from showcase bars like Alligator Lounge on the Westside to neighborhood clubhouses, from rallies at the Federal Building to the bedroom of zine writer Princess Robin on her sixteenth birthday.

We were invited to a meeting by Atlantic Records but we took one look at the faceless monolith housing its offices and hurried back to our pick up truck.

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song 014 : Psychedelic Tea Dance

A story about Fire Island in the Sixties, but also a realist snapshot of hanging out with Holly. Live, Holly read from her autobiography A Lowlife in High Heels while we sat on the ground or on stools behind her playing along like a tribal ensemble. “Babies, take me home,” she'd say when she tired of her meet and greet.

One of my favorite memories of Holly is of a gig she did with us at a Revolution Rising fundraiser in West Hollywood. One crowd must have scared off the other because neither Holly’s regulars nor ours showed up.

After Revolution Rising and Lucid Nation packed up, Holly gathered us around her like kids at a campfire. She cheered us up, singing a song about being glad to be you and screw what the rest of the world thinks. Her affectionate performance was flawless.
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song 013 : More Pagan than Babylon

When Lou Reed sang Holly came from Miami FLA in his famous song Walk on the Wild Side he was singing about the fabulous Holly Woodlawn. Ronnie and I were good friends of Holly’s for a time. We were lucky enough to escort her when she wore a glamorous sequined gown to the Director’s Guild premier of her restored art film Broken Goddess.

The star of Andy Warhol’s Trash also performed spoken word live backed by Lucid Nation unplugged. This recording took place in an apartment. We joined in the conversation or commented with music where it seemed appropriate, and laughed a lot. We overlapped Holly’s vocal tracks to overwhelm the listener, to suggest the way Warhol’s factory was overwhelming; but you can turn your balance to the right or left speaker to hear one narrative at a time.

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song 012 : The Sun Doesn’t Rise in the Slaughterhouse (Live at Peace and Justice Center)

Debbie was born near where Jim Morrison was born and her way with epic word poems always reminds me of him. But she was drumming while reciting all this from memory!

I’m giving you every version of Slaughterhouse and of Penetration that I have. Future episodes of the Hundred Song March will have very little repetition. I hope to put up some video of this song soon performed at our very first show.

I saw Slaughterhouse reduce people to tears live and I shit you not she converted a few to vegetarianism on the spot.

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song 011 : Happy (Live at Peace and Justice Center)

This song is about the way the so called sexual revolution didn’t really change the roles people play, it only opened the door for both genders to get lost in the traditional stereotypes. I didn’t want to play mommy or daddy, whore or loser, I just wanted to be me.

I was really into John Bradshaw and Wilhelm Reich at the time. Bradshaw helped me see the rigid physics of human abuse, the way it repeats itself through generations; he laid bare the fixed roles and games.

I first heard of Wilhelm Reich on a Patti Smith Group bootleg called Teenage Perversity in the Night. I read his books Character Analysis and Listen, Little Man, and some of his book about how Fascism happened. To me he is second only to Guy Debord in the accuracy of his analysis of how our society works and what motivates irrational violence. His case studies of sexual repression are both tragic and hilarious.

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song 010 : Penetration (Live at Peace and Justice Center)

Debbie’s voice over loudspeakers echoing across downtown L.A was surreal. The funny thing was even though the event was created for just such self expression some people thought we were too controversial for the show because of this song so we didn't get asked back.

You can hear the doubt in Debbie’s voice when she says “we’re all equal.” She could see what was happening in the audience. The stir of discontent among the dominant males. The females were busy watching children and preparing food.

But then there were a few who helped us move our gear while telling us how much they liked our music so the gig wasn't a total loss. We were trying to build coalitions between undergrounds. Open a flow between scenes. But none of our riot grrrl friends had dared to make the Peace and Justice show in the barrio.

Penetration was one of two songs we recorded for Chelsea Starr of Alive Records, the MC5 imprint Greg Shaw had started was going to sign us but we were so anti-label, so completely programmed by riot grrrl DIY principles that we backed out of the deal. Sorry, Chelsea!
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song 009 : Angry Pelicans (Live at Peace and Justice Center)

As you’ll hear near the end of the Hundred Song March, at first this was a Cat Cult song Ronnie sang called The Boulevard in my Backyard. Debbie sang these lyrics as a joke at an early Lucid Nation rehearsal and found herself singing it from then on.

Angry Pelicans was Debbie’s nickname for Republicans. She also shares the street kid trick she used to ward off unwanted attention. But my favorite line is “no tulips in May.” How many runaway kids wish they could return to the sanctuary of a backyard garden?

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song 008 : Dad (Live at Peace and Justice Center)

That’s me asking people to move their cars! Check out the girlish “thank you.” The Theremin sound at the beginning of this track is Ronnie fiddling with the tuning tone on our Acoustic 360 bass amp, a refrigerator sized monster with an 18” folded horn cabinet we lugged all over the west coast. I especially liked its distinctive aqua formica panel. You can see Acoustic 360 and 370 amps in the background of many shots of The Doors or Led Zeppelin live.

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song 007 : Revolution Rising Spoken Word

From the Revolution Rising zine and cassette compilation (if anybody out there has one please make a copy for me). Danielle was one of the founders of Revolution Rising. The photos of us together were taken by Danielle.

Danielle and several other founders of Revolution Rising, especially Tye, Sisi and Debbie L gave us our first gigs, nagged us into agreeing to play them, inspired us by sharing good writing and music, photographed us, and here, even recorded us. I think of Lucid Nation as a result of Revolution Rising, their mad experiment with equality gone terribly right.

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song 006 : Penetration (live at Cobalt)

I love the way we miss the second beat of the big E minor power chord intro; hey it was only our third gig!

Debbie was at a low key rock club once upon a time when three frat guys leaned in on her roommate, a petite dancer. They were obnoxious and threatening. Debbie stepped in front of her roommate. The drunkest frat guy exchanged a few choice insults with her. Easily bested, he threw a drink in her face. She threw hers back so he threw a punch.

Debbie neatly avoided his punch and hit him so hard in the face he fell backwards over a table. His two friends tried to jump her but met with the same fate. Did I mention that Debbie’s dad was a champion Marine boxer? Debbie’s nickname was Einstein. Check out the way she puns penile and penal in this her anti-rape epic.

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song 005 : Youth Against Fascism

Ronnie’s punked up cover of the Sonic Youth classic takes on extra meaning when you know he comes from a Holocaust survivor family. AOL featured a digital art exhibit about his family’s experiences on their front page one gloomy Saturday.

When I met Ronnie we were both right out of high school; he was the ex lead singer of a band with a biker following. The same biker clans that had followed Manson way back in the day. No shit. Ronnie’s band ruled redneck north valley when he was eighteen.
I think I was his first real friend. I had to civilize him. I had to teach him to value honesty, compassion and flossing. But it was worth it; talk about a diamond in the rough.

A veteran of riot grrrl and Food Not Bombs, you’d think he’d be a shaved punk, but instead he looks like an occultist guitarist ala early Page or Bolan. He understands astrology and tarot, yes; and he hunches over a collection of vintage pedals conspiring haunting sounds for hours. He was even Poet in Residence at Newtopia Magazine.

But unlike the mystical dreamers of the Seventies, Ronnie loves business. And he brings true punk values to his job. He helps people realize their dreams without selling their souls.

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song 004 : The Sun Doesn’t Rise in the Slaughterhouse (live at Cobalt)

Debbie’s vegetarian epic was inspired by an epiphany she experienced watching a cow peacefully graze under blue sky one Thanksgiving Day. A vision of the cow’s horrible fate unfolded and she understood how violence is hidden everywhere in our supposedly civilized society, and how all violence is connected.

For the intro and outro I tried to capture the dying cow’s groans by scraping the bass strings, while Ronnie used an analog echo pedal to create the sound of machinery accelerating then slowing down to the steady pace of the slaughterhouse.

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song 003 : Landmark (live at Cobalt)

I grew up on a side street just off the boulevard Cobalt is on, but way east in the barrio. My mom worked as a waitress on that street. For me family dinner meant having a swivel stool at the formica bar with a plastic menu to choose from. I drove to jobs on that street. I was nearly murdered a few blocks north of it. When I got the chance to get away I never returned.

Singing Landmark back on the boulevard where so much of my life happened was intense. You can hear how upset I was. I had driven down that avenue to the school I mention in the song. It was right next to a dump.

California landmark/ as if anyone could care/stuck on a fault in here/under fire out there/all my fake family and alleged friends/TV celebrates another way to pretend/trying to find some kind of life/Freeway ends in a mile/here at the edge of the world/fire red sky meets the tide/in the eyes of an angry girl/Ain’t no childhood there’s only rules/of conformity enforced at every school/tight lipped hypocrites controlling every dream/steady diet of violence breeds the elite/hey do you like this little life?

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song 002 : Dad (live at Cobalt)

Cobalt is a small all ages club deep in the San Fernando Valley. Revolution Rising was centered in the East L.A. and Hollywood areas so this was an outreach they did, having a zine table at our show in the ‘burbs.

Many people dismissed riot grrrl as a white upper class movement but Revolution Rising was Hispanic, Asian, and everything else, plus boys were allowed to join. The founders did zines like Venus in the Trenches, Meathook, and Housewife Turned Assassin.

They promoted gigs with great bands like Spitboy, Heavens to Betsy, Los Crudos, and Bikini Kill. They sponsored open wall art shows where neither hierarchies nor criticism were allowed. They believed any person is an artist and only needs a chance to prove it.

“O.J.’s gonna knock that chip off her shoulder,” are my opening words. Simpson said that about Marcia Clark. The last line of Dad is from John and Yoko’s song Woman is the Nigger of the World.

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song 001 : Syndrome (live at Cobalt)

Ronnie’s one minute portrait of growing up with a desperate housewife mom became our second college radio hit from The Stillness of Over. I contributed the line: “her best friend she hates went to the famous doctor got a Picasso face.” This is the first audio recording of Lucid Nation live.

That’s me repeating meow meow obnoxiously over and over again during the sound check, a habit I brought into the recording studio, too, as you’ll hear when the Hundred Song March reaches our Suburban Legends CD.

I actually researched this meowing habit and found out that at a French convent in the Middle Ages the nuns meowed together daily for hours. The priests said it was possession. Was it a flashback to the ancient Egyptian temple of the cat goddess Bast, where they had cat shaped bells they'd ring, and say pleasure? I’d like to think so.

Or were the nuns protesting? Were they spiritual ancestors of riot grrl? Or did chronic anxiety cause disassociation and hyper-suggestibility, delusions spun from a common superstition that women could be possessed by cats as demonic would-be familiars? (Man! Talk about fear of pussy!) Or was it just a practical joke?

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