100 SONG MARCH

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

2006-07-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-07-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-16T23:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2006-07-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2006-07-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2006-07-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-07-03T20:47:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2006-06-29T23:14:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-20T21:20:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-19T18:51:00.000-07:00

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

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song 148 : Carbon Monoxide (Mung Jung Bushi)

2006-06-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 147 : After The Past (Mung Jung Bushi)

2006-06-15T23:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-15T01:49:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 144 : Carcineria (Mung Jung Bushi)

2006-06-13T01:05:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-06-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-07T02:42:00.000-07:00

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.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 137 : Misguided Optimists of September (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-06-06T01:34:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-05T01:45:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-03T18:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-06-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

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.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 133 : Haunted by Sirens in the Fog (outtake) (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-31T18:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

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.
Listen to the song: Click Here

song 131 : 30 States In 30 Days (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-29T00:48:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-28T03:07:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-27T01:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-26T00:13:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-25T00:09:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-23T00:25:00.000-07:00

song 124 : Kindred (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-21T23:58:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-21T00:16:00.000-07:00

“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)

2006-05-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-19T00:22:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-18T04:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-05-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 118 : Note To Self (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-16T00:32:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 115 : Lucretia (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-13T01:33:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-12T02:26:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 113 : Tacoma Ballet (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-11T01:25:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-09T01:09:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-05-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 107 : Fall (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-04T02:39:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 106 : Hallow (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 105 : Seven Stringer (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-05-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

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?

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song 104 : End of the Line (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-04-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 103 : Big Dog (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-04-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

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.

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song 102 : Welcome to America (Tacoma Ballet)

2006-04-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-27T01:53:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-26T05:03:00.000-07:00

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.”

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

2006-04-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2006-04-23T02:37:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-21T21:55:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-16T00:37:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-14T01:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 089 : Blue Kitty (Outtake)

2006-04-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 088 : Israel Fake Heel (Outtake)

2006-04-12T00:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 087 : Carolina Highway Serenade (Outtakes)

2006-04-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

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)

2006-04-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

song 084 : Vampire (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-06T23:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 083 : Little Sister (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-06T00:34:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 082 : Dark Pool (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-04T23:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 081 : Commercial (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 080 : Climb (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

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.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 079 : Hometown (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-04-02T01:05:00.000-08:00

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”

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-04-01T02:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 077 : Hypervigilant (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-03-31T00:42:00.000-08:00

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."

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 076 : Las Vegas (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-03-30T01:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 075 : Girl Band (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-03-29T00:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 074 : Punkophony (Suburban Legends + Outtakes)

2006-03-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 073 : LA River (mixed by Neil Perry)

2006-03-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

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)

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 072 : Coyote (Out take)

2006-03-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

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!

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-03-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 070 : GKM (DNA + Outtakes)

2006-03-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

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.”

Listen to the song: Click Here

song 069 : Fun (DNA + Outtakes)

2006-03-23T01:23:00.000-08:00

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!

Listen to the song: Click Here

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

2006-03-22T00:39:00.000-08:00

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!

Listen to the song: Click Here