Aug 302010
Lennon’s john.
Using the introductory phrase “Speaking of…” see if we can’t build a chain of tangentially related rock thoughts.
I’ll start this exercise with the following: “Speaking of the Bealtes, did you see that a toilet used by John Lennon was auctioned off for nearly $15,000?”
The first person who posts to this “speaking of…” should build, tangentially, off John Lennon, rock ‘n roll toilets, auctions, or any other tangentially related subject – just not the original subject that we assume had been spoken of, “The Beatles.”
Got that? The following person posting would then build off the previous “speaking of…”
As I was saying, Speaking of the Bealtes, did you see that a toilet used by John Lennon was auctioned off for nearly $15,000?
Speaking of rock n roll toilets, Blondie is putting out a new record and talk about all of the missing NYC landmarks like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB in this Post article http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/music/my_new_york_blondie_ZsHXFcXt1CmV8Uo8YQpFKO
Speaking of Blondie, she’s playing down the street tonight, at the sort-of-notoriously-not-cool-but-not-square-not-big-but-not-small-not-nice-but-not-a-dump-either joint, the State Theater. It’s amazing how many bands play that place “on the way down.” I believe every city has its own State Theater, where you’ll see Blondie on Monday, a Bruce Springsteen tribute band on Tuesday and the only-one-member-left version of Badfinger on Wednesday. Then — WTF?! — the Buzzcocks or somebody cool will show up on Thursday. On Friday it’ll be back to “80s dance night with The Legwarmers!”
Speaking of Badfinger, I read the other day that they are getting the reissue/remaster treatment, http://www.undercover.com.au/News-Story.aspx?id=11263
Speaking of James Taylor’s Apple debut, what was written first, Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” or George Harrison’s “Something,” which opens with Taylor’s title. I would think Taylor’s song came (ie, was written) first.
Speaking of debut albums, Supagroup is re-issuing their debut in a couple of weeks. I never knew the inside story behind it, and reading it makes me love the band even more. It follows — Rock on!
Supagroup had been around, as a concept, if not exactly a band, for about two years at this point. Benji and I had previously made a record in Anchorage, AK called ‘Planet Rock’ in 1996, and had had some success with it due to a music video we made for the song ‘China Rock’. Benji sings it, and in fact on that record Ben and I rougly split the singing duties. I was in college in New Orleans and Benji was in high school in Anchorage, so we could only play live in Alaska in the Summers and at Christmas break. We couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that state. But the drummer on the recording, Michael Holtz, had no intention of leaving Alaska. So it was hard to go out and play live shows outside of these little windows. Furthermore, as a trio, and being very influenced by what was going on at the moment – Nirvana, Weezer, and the Pixies come to mind – we hadn’t exactly found the sound we were looking for. We liked what we were doing, but didn’t love it. ‘Planet Rock’ certainly reflected this. After a LOT of work trying to get college, then commercial radio, to play the song, MTV2 picked up the video, played it a lot, and soon we were going out to L.A. to showcase. But we had not had a lot of practice and/or shows under our belt before we got there. Benji had just got out of high school.
I don’t know if every band has to go through this, but we had a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment when we showcased for Giant Records in L.A. and were TERRIBLE. The people of the record industry kinda hated going to see new bands, so if you got somebody to come out, they expected it to be on a weeknight and at like eight pm. They didn’t want to waste a weekend night or miss a nice dinner, I guess. Well, the LA bands on the bill knew this and we didn’t, so when it was suggested we ‘headline’ the show, we jumped at it. Oy, what a mistake. The label rep was pissed she was stuck there all night and on top of that, it meant we were about three hours drunker than we intended to be when we finally played. We were bad, and I mean astonishingly crappy, unprofessional, and greeeeeen. It was horrible, and we blew it, at least with that company. Less hard headed people would have said after that, ‘Gee, I wonder what law school is like?’ Instead, we became determined to become as bad ass a live band as we possibly could. We wanted to go on tour like the big boys.
The first thing that needed to change was the songwriting. We decided that we needed to play music that we wanted to hear on the radio, not what was already there. Hard Rock, sans big hair and glammy outfits, but also without irony. We developed a mission statement – To Rock with a capital R. Every song must Rock and/or Roll. Every song must have a guitar solo. Not a lot of bands were doing this at the time, and certainly not at the major label level. We were told we should jump on the rap/rock train that was picking up steam, but it just seemed…so lame. And we found the best subjects to write about were Chicks, Booze, and… Rock and Roll. This is the beginning of many songs we wrote ABOUT rocking. ‘Rock and Roll Tried to Ruin My Life’, ‘We Came To Rock You’, and ‘Rock and Roll Star’ were all written in this era. We basically wanted to be a half Chinese version of AC/DC at this point. Benji knew that if we were to accomplish this kind of music, we needed a second guitar, so I switched to rythym from bass. This is also when I started singing all the songs. Benji also knew we would need a full time, hard hitting drummer. This turned out to be Mark Brill.
Brill was a friend of mine from Tulane as well as the drummer for Burnversion. He had also played with James Hall. Killer drummer, a basher, exceptional at punk rock tempos. Also, chicks loved him, as he usually played in only a pair of swim trunks. He had a relentless work ethic and wanted to practice all the time. It was like exercise for him, and we probably practiced five or six times a week for two hours plus at a clip – for years. Even when we started doing two hundred shows a year on the road, we would always practice this same way when we were home. He turned us on to our first bass player, Brad Lingo (RIP) who loved what we were doing. We eventually ended up in this metal shed at Overhead Door company, and in New Orleans it would often be over 100 degrees in there. You know how in prison movies, they’d always throw the protagonist into ‘the hole’ and the heat would eventually drive him crazy? That’s how practice was, and we loved it. It’s where we got good.
We started playing the New Orleans local circuit – Mermaid, Nick’s, Jimmy’s, Tips, Howlin’ Wolf, etc. The Matador didn’t exist yet. We played around town a lot, too much really. But there is no substitute for the live experience and that’s what we got. We’d try out new songs every show – whether they had lyrics or not – to see how the crowd would react. If they weren’t done, I would just scat over the music or make up lyrics as I went along. We called it ‘Speaking in Tongues’, a nod to Benji and I’s Pentacostal upbrining. In fact, we still do this. You can hear it clearly on a few songs on ‘We Came To Rock You’.
So to go on the road, you need to have a recording to send to clubs for review. Honestly, they don’t really give a shit as long as you get people in there to drink beer, but hey, that’s the way it works. Sending out ‘Planet Rock’ probably hurt us more than helped us too, because we weren’t really that band anymore. We didn’t have any money for recording but were about to book a studio anyway. We saw this Mermaid show as a way to solidify the songs we wanted to record. Jeff Treffinger, one of the owners of the club, had installed a sixteen channel board and (I think) a half inch tape machine to record all the various bands they had in there. We asked him to record the show so we could review it before recording the album. When we heard it, we loved it. We asked “why should we spend a bunch of money on a studio when this show would tell out of town clubs exactly what they were getting?” Jeff and Benji remixed it in December of 1997 and we made a thousand copies in early 1998. The first two hundred copies went out to clubs around the country, and soon after, we were on the road.
Speaking of toilets, John Lennon’s was a real fruitbowl.