In June 2003, I moved to Austin, a city that bills itself as the live music capital of the world, and thereupon stopped playing live and have not resumed in the eight years since. Yeah, I know, right? The main reason was that I threw myself into something different: I'd read the book Word Freak, about the tournament Scrabble scene, and heard the call. Not a matter of merely wanting to do it - a matter of having to do it. So I started learning Scrabble words and strategy, and once I got here started going to the Austin club, and on Labor Day Weekend 2003 played my first tournament in Houston. Been doing it ever since, and it's been great - I've had a lot of reasons to celebrate, and I've made a lot of good friends. I'm much better known as a Scrabble player than I ever was as a musician, actually. Those first few years I really studied and practiced a lot, and other things in my life were bound to take a backseat at least to some degree.
I wrote some music here and there, but not much. I was living with my youngest brother, John, for the first couple of years I was here. John had first taken up guitar and then switched to bass as a teenager - he was making progress, but with folks that young it's hard to know how far they'll end up taking it. (My sister Mary also plays some guitar and piano and has a good singing voice, and I have no doubt she too would have done well in music had she pursued it.) When I got to Austin, John was 21, and it was clear he was going to go far on his instrument. He was a full-fledged Tool fanatic by then - certainly an excellent band and bass player for any hard rock musician to emulate - and both his chops and his sound were growing rapidly then and still are. John's got that gearhead piece that I've never really had but often wished I did; he's very knowledgeable about basses and bass amps and other gear and each rig he's built has sounded more refined and thunderous than the last. He's in a fantastic band called Aperture now, who can be heard at their website, aperturesounds.com.
John and I have always been close, and with music we have so much to talk about. I've been really proud and happy to be around to witness his musical adventures and growth. John has busted his ass to get to where he is, and there's not much I respect more than that. I have often wished I could find a way to do more to share my experience with him and help him, though he's doing more than fine on his own. Absolutely a pro-level player, hardworking, energetic, dedicated, a strong composer as well. Seems like we should have played together more, and we still may do so yet...we did have a studio band when we lived together, of a sort. All 47 of our songs are short (the shortest was seven seconds) and most are absurd and/or extremely obscene comedy pieces. Not for the easily offended; available upon request. We laughed our asses off making that stuff.
As for my more serious writing, I didn't do much of it for a few years there. My financial situation improved dramatically in the years after I got to Austin, and I've upgraded my home studio. I have a stand-alone 16-track digital recorder, and over the past four years I've put a good number of new ideas down, over 100. I've wanted to return more quickly and furiously and get music done and available for people to hear - but that's been difficult. Which has been the case often, as you might guess from reading this series. I've never been short of ideas or musical vocabulary, but I've often had a very hard time digging in and getting music fully written and recorded. The gun's loaded but firing it's another thing entirely. I could dwell on why, but I won't, because ultimately it doesn't matter. Right now the fact is that I have a massive backlog of unrealized musical ideas, over 25 years' worth of them. By no means do I think all of them are good or worth revisiting - even the best writers, ones I would idolize, write a lot of junk - and I want to write lots of new music as well. But there's some serious reclaiming to do.
A new thing, and I wish I'd done it a few years earlier: I bought an electronic drum kit in the summer of 2009. (I live in an apartment, so an acoustic kit is out of the question.) I've spent some time learning drums and recording with live drums since, though I'd like to step that up and bring my skills on the instrument up to where I'm not clearly worse on drums than on the other instruments. Still a long way to go, years of practice, but I'm not old, and I've been more motivated this way the past six months or so.
***
Going back to my musical family for a moment...my sister Mary's oldest daughter Natalie's first birthday was at the end of July 2010, and Mary came up with a great idea: record a CD of the family making music, both as a gift to Natalie for her first birthday and a memory for all six of us. I recorded and produced the project, but making the music was a truly collective endeavor. Lots of duets and trios and a very wide range of music: my mom singing lullabies, my dad singing blues and playing piano and organ, two siblings and I covering Steely Dan, my recording of a medley of War Pigs and Kashmir, Brian doing a dead-on imitation of Johnny Cash, Mary singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow and many more. I was newly reminded of just how musical we all are, and what a pleasure it was. We'll listen back to it fondly in ten years and beyond, I am sure.
***
In late 2009 or early 2010, having virtually no music online or, heck, any evidence that I was ever a musician (I was busiest in the era right *before* everything got put online), I decided it was getting about mandatory to put some music up. Even if it was only demos, even if the audio and performances were notably flawed. Screw perfectionism - anything is better than nothing. Busting through the psychological block is the most, perhaps the only, important result. The block is strong: It took me until the fall of 2010 to get around to posting six of the ten songs planned for my current project (I still tend to think of projects in terms of the length of a conventional album, ten songs or so). Felt really good to get those up, but again I couldn't fire the remaining bullets for six more months. Songs #7 and #8 got posted about a week ago, and I did vocals for song #9 a couple of hours ago. #10 is fully composed. Hear the songs here: http://listn.to/TremblesofFortune
So yes, I will have the first Trembles of Fortune album done in demo form very soon. The next thing to do? Start on another. And another. Keep sledgehammering that psychological block until it breaks. Of course, I have to work this into the rest of my life; I have a 40-hour-a-week job, and I direct the Austin Scrabble club now, and big tournaments are coming up in the next three months that I'll need many hours of prep for, and there's time with my family and friends and getting some exercise and all the other things that keep life balanced. Music is a central part of me, but it's just one part.
To move this project further, I'll also need to learn how to get the music heard. I'm behind the curve there - I've never been particularly knowledgeable about promotion to begin with, and it's been years, and the Internet music world has sprung up all around us. I have a lot to learn. And I'll need to reach out to other people to do it - I can sit here and make demos by myself, but if I want to fry bigger fish I'll need to establish relationships that help (and that give me chances to help others). That will be perhaps the biggest challenge, but no man is an island.
***
So have I gotten in music what I came for? Well, I have to be honest, the answer is no, or at least not yet. The primary reason I became a musician and composer was to write, record and perform my own music, exactly the kind I want to write, at a high level. I don't mean a high level of fame and fortune - it's not about those things at all. I mean to where I'm realizing the music in my head, prolifically making honest-to-goodness releasable recordings of it and fronting the bands playing it. With not nearly enough exceptions, this hasn't come to be, and the responsibility is mine. Every day I have to look in the mirror knowing that I haven't made my dream happen, and it doesn't feel good. However long I have left, I'd like to improve that situation. Even achieving some of the dream, parts of it - because anything is better than nothing, and some is good but more is better. All that matters is that I take the challenge head-on and persist.
As for playing live again, yeah, I love it, but I've also been there and done it, nearly a thousand times. If I go out again as a recurring thing, it's got to be me doing what I want to do musically and nothing less. I miss the stage, but I don't miss the bars. And I don't miss the logistical hassles that bands go through, like, for example, pleading with wannabe brownshirt security personnel about parking and unloading gear, or getting home at 4 am on a work night. Doing the club thing can be a real grind at times, especially at the medium and lower tiers of it, and I don't have many contacts in the Austin scene. On the other hand, taking a band out to play my music would be incredibly satisfying. But right now, it's not a concern. Recording music comes first.
But while I regret what hasn't happened, that doesn't mean I regret what did happen. I don't, not at all. I've gotten the chance to play so many kinds of music with and for so many different people, to the point where it required a 9-part series to write about it and I've left a lot of musical experiences out. I didn't talk about teaching lessons, or doing studio work (including a lot of karaoke backing tracks) or arranging, or many short stints in groups, or many individual players I jammed and worked on home-type projects with. (I also didn't write about sex or drugs or alcohol or interpersonal dramas - all of those things were part of the experience, I won't lie to you, but in writing here I wanted to focus on the music itself, not the VH1 Behind the Music elements.) And I could have done even more different things if I'd been more motivated that way. I played with many excellent musicians, from whom I learned much, and made a number of great friends, and had a few special experiences a lot of musicians don't get to have. A lot of good memories, and I'm truly grateful for everything music has given me, past, present and future.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
My Musical Life - Part 8
When I started playing with the UCO jazz program in fall 1997, my contacts in the local music scene got a helpful boost, as many of the other students and instructors were gigging musicians like me. I got some pick-up gigs quickly, mostly on bass (everyone needs a bass player), and word also got around to a couple of local cover bands, fairly high on that particular food chain, with unsettled bass situations. I tried out for one band who were thinking of firing their bass player, but they ended up reconciling. Then I got a call from another band, a very well-established band in the local scene - the guy I spoke with told me that their bass player was moving to Atlanta soon. I went to one of their club shows and sat in on bass for a few songs, and it went well, and it looked like I was going to get the spot. I definitely wanted to join, despite the band's stodgy set list, since the band had lots of gigs and ones that would pay me better than I'd made with any other band before (granted, not that much). I needed the money: note recurring theme. Well, it took an unusually long time for them to get back to me, and when they did I heard the news - their bassist, on the night before he was supposed to leave for Atlanta, totaled his car. He wasn't hurt too badly, but this meant he couldn't afford to move and had to stay in town and with the band. Oh jeez, c'mon, what are the odds of that...
I was bummed, of course. I needed a gig. But what I didn't know was that this would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. In February 1998, not long after, I got a phone call from a guy named Wayman, who I'd worked with briefly in shipping and receiving at the state health department - seven years (!) before. Wayman was a drummer, and he and I went to lunch together a few times, talked about music, played demo tapes for each other. I hadn't heard from him since then, so this was quite the surprise. Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I have a weird name and am thus easy to find in a phone book. Wayman told me that he had this band called Banana Seat...are you ready for this - with ELEVEN members in it, a full horn section, two female singers...the band did 70s and early 80s music, stuff with big arrangements: Chicago, Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire. A lot of that older stuff I knew and liked. My mind was blowing about then, and he mentioned that they were firing their keyboardist and invited me down to try out. Which I did, with a quickness, and got the spot.
I was going to make my debut with them in a few weeks, but after I got the tapes of the songs to learn, Wayman told me that their departing keyboardist wasn't going to be able to play that weekend. I said I'd do it. This meant learning keyboard parts to 35 songs in four days, and it wasn't just comping piano chords - I had to know the arrangements, a string part here, a synth part there, a hand clap after the guitar solo. At least well enough to get the band through the gig. I stayed up all night charting and learning songs that night. I'm sure I missed a lot of little details in that first show, but no matter. I was wondering how in the heck an 11-member band could manage to get paid playing clubs in the OKC area, and when I got to that first show I learned how: the place was packed wall-to-wall. The band was getting really popular locally just about then. So that was energizing, and even more so, the music was so fun to play! Especially on keys. It was pop, but the task was damn near as challenging as playing jazz, in a different way. Had to juggle a lot of parts on two keyboards, all while handling more patch changes live than I'd ever had to before. I was overjoyed.
I would end up playing in Banana Seat for five years, and we played a LOT. Almost every weekend, Friday and Saturday, for almost the whole time I was in the band. Oklahoma City, Norman, Tulsa, Dallas...plus lots of private parties and weddings (where the real money was made). I did close to 500 shows with the band, more than with every other band I've been in, combined. For the first three years we were at or near the very top of our local scene, as far as cover bands went. We had the top booking agency in town booking us, and we brought in a boatload of money: even after the money was divided 11 ways instead of the four or five that a typical band would have, I was still making twice or three times what I'd made in bands before then. Wasn't quite enough to live on, but not all that far off at the best of times.
What our club shows were like: we'd usually play 3-4 sets, 30-35 songs. Start at 10, quit near 2. Our audience was maybe 60-70 percent female, which I can't say I objected to. Lots of eye candy to look at from the stage. Our stage plot was unusual - Wayman, the drummer, set up front center stage, since he was also the lead singer. The four horns (two trumpets, trombone, alto sax) were on a platform behind him; the two female singers to one side of the stage, with me and the lead guitarist behind them; and the bassist and rhythm guitarist on the other side. We had lots of little period props, like a Lite-Brite and an old TV playing Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows, and lots of percussion toys all over the place. Tons of mikes, because we had five regular singers. (I wasn't one of them, but it was okay since the keyboard parts had me so busy I couldn't have covered that many backing vocals anyway.) Very often the club stages we played on were too small for us, so we were cramped onstage a lot - I can remember my back hurting after shows sometimes from being wedged in behind my keyboard rig in a less than natural position. You do what you gotta do, and besides, we often got free beer so I didn't feel the back pain until later!
The band's image was...okay, I say this lovingly, if y'all Banana Seaters are reading this, and the crowds didn't seem to mind, but jeez, we looked boring. "Network Solution Associates Business Sales Department, Midwest Region, out on happy hour" would cover it reasonably well. And we weren't making up for it with stage moves either, not that it would have been a great idea to begin with. The music spoke for us, though, and I think we did a good job choosing songs. We took pains to avoid the obvious choices - we wouldn't play the #1 hit, so much as we'd play that follow-up that peaked at #14, but that you have cool memories of. We were always getting requests for the most obvious choices - "Brick House" and "Play That Funky Music" were the most frequent ones. We never played either song; we were a cover band, but we did the covers we wanted to do.
Despite our palpable lack of a cool image, we continued to draw well enough that we got to open for some well-known 80s acts, most notably Men at Work (who were fantastic) and Rick Springfield (who wasn't). Maybe 3,000 in the audience at each show, something like that. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a serious rush to do that, but really, it's not that much different than a smaller show. You still set your gear up, play the songs on the set list taped to the stage by your feet as best you can like you rehearsed them, and then it's over and you go drink some more and talk to people and stuff.
We had some experienced songwriters in the band - Steve, the rhythm guitarist, Chris, the bassist, Wayman the drummer/lead singer, and me. About, what was it, 2000, we started playing a few originals, and we had plans to go into a nearby studio and record a CD. With the good turnouts at our shows, surely we'd sell a few, no? And I was definitely dreaming of writing originals for this band - how could I not? I mean, an 11-piece band, with horns and five or six skilled vocalists and everything, and established in a style that was a comfortable fit for my own? The band could have played the hell out of the Trembles stuff had they a mind to, though that wasn't going to happen and shouldn't have - those songs are in my voice, not theirs. And I'd be writing with other writers - good ones, but stylistically quite different, more early power-pop influenced, not jazz/soul/arena rock influenced as I was. And as fun as a lot of our material was to perform, playing mostly the same covers weekend after weekend was getting a little old, and I hungered to get back into some original music.
The Banana Seat CD, called Everything Glitters, took two years to make. If that sounds like some tooth-pulling was involved, yes, that's correct. The process was drawn out and at times contentious, and by the end of it we were kind of exhausted musically and emotionally, I suspect. One issue was that the four writers were the only ones really that enthusiastic about doing the original thing, which I wasn't happy about at the time, but looking back I understand. It's one thing to ask someone to rehearse once or twice a week, play two gigs on the weekends, have fun and get paid. It's quite another to ask someone to commit to a creative vision not their own, to the point of rehearsing all the time and playing shows full of originals for no money, which might lead to, what, regional touring - let's all get in a van and drive around busting our balls so we can play for tiny crowds in medium-small dot towns up the Pacific coast or wherever...the members of the band were older this time, and some of them were married with kids. Not sure what I was really expecting there; I'd have done all that, but I had nothing to lose. And I was unnecessarily obnoxious about a lot of creative issues, I'll freely admit. But what hurt more on a personal level is that here was a golden opportunity to show what I could do as a writer, and I really didn't back the talk with material. I have two writing credits on the 10-song album, but the number isn't the point; I had a lot of respect for the other writers in the band and was happy to have their work represented as much or more than my own. My songs are good songs, I think, but I was haunted by the thought that I had better stuff in me that I didn't get out when it mattered. And that this might be the best chance I'd ever have with a band - though that didn't really take into account the reality of the situation, either. I was past 30, with no particular successes outside of music, and the selfish sense that this would be my last best run at musical notoriety was in play as well.
We gave it a brief run, playing the songs off the album, selling a few CDs. Didn't really make a splash and we went back to our usual covers business...but there was one great adventure left even then. On the way home from a Tulsa gig, Wayman and I were talking and he mentioned there was this project organized by some musicians in other local OKC bands called the Mixtape Club. The idea was that every month or two the club would put on a show, covering the songs of one particular artist for a whole night; various bands and guest musicians would all pitch in to pull the show off. And one artist they had thought about was Steely Dan, and Banana Seat (who played some Steely Dan already) was about the only band around who could pull something like that off. Both Wayman and I are huge Steely Dan fans - sometimes after rehearsal he and I would stay after and jam on some SD...to say one thing about my friend Wayman, he's an eternal optimist. He believed we could do anything, that huge success was always just around the corner; it wasn't always, of course, but we did have a lot of success when you look back, so in many respects Wayman's been vindicated.
So anyway, we kept talking on that ride home, and what started as one or two sets, total of ten, twelve, maybe fifteen songs, became "we're going to learn three full sets of Steely Dan". And given the timetable of the project, we had two months or so to pull it off. Whoa, shit...as anyone who knows Steely Dan's music knows, it's among the most complex music ever to succeed on the pop charts. Steely Dan themselves didn't play live after their first couple of albums, and most of their classic 70s releases were done with a phalanx of ace L.A. studio musicians who rendered their jazzy tracks smooth as silk. This was another enterprise where most of the band had to be cajoled into it - we were definitely spending whatever currency we had with everybody. A ton of rehearsals, both as a full band and in sections - horns, vocals, rhythm players. There was just so much to learn, so quickly. Aside from handling all the keyboards, a daunting task in itself, my role was to write out charts for the bassist and for the horns. I'd come home every night from work and go at it, for weeks. Constantly on deadline. My chops were up, I'll say that. We had the help of a number of talented guest musicians, too, which was fun and a much-needed boost, I think. We played the Steely Dan tribute show in December 2002, and while it wasn't perfect - how could it have been - we pulled it off damn believably, and it was perhaps the most satisfying live musical experience I've ever had, bar none, even more than opening for big acts or playing in front of large crowds. The second set was the Aja album, in its entirety. We painted a backdrop of the album cover; Marnie and Melissa, our two female singers, dressed in Japanese costumes for the performance of the title track. The night ended with a sloppy but fun rendition of the complex, reharmonized Alive in America version of Reelin' in the Years. There were maybe 50-75 people in the audience, many good friends of ours and guest performers. It was a celebration, one we'd really worked hard for. I'm indebted to everyone in Banana Seat and the guest performers for the joy I got from that night - this was a collective achievement through and through.
Anyway, returning to the Banana Seat album: was it any good? I'm listening to it right now, for the first time in at least five years, probably seven...yeah, it's better than I remember it. Much better. No reason whatsoever we should be disappointed about it. In retrospect, I'm proud as hell of us. Flawed, sure, but you can hear the ambition. What we were trying to do was a bitch, and it wasn't anything like anyone else was doing at the time. There are some soaring performances; for one, Marnie's singing still just blows me away. And the writing's pretty damn good. I love a lot of the vocal arrangements - we had so many good singers in the band. I'm at least a credible rock singer, and I was probably the fifth or sixth-best vocalist among us, put it that way. It's hard to quantify what's missing - a prominent thought I had in the past hour is "what would this album have been if we'd had a producer and recorded in a better studio". That's not to insult our engineer, and maybe that situation couldn't have come about...but some bright spark could have really spun a gem from the best parts of this record. The raw materials were there.
In early 2003, I found myself newly inspired to come up with some songs for a possible second Banana Seat album. We didn't make another album, but we did play a few of those songs live. I definitely felt a sense of too little, too late - these were among the best pop-flavored songs I think I've ever written, but it seemed unlikely that we'd take another shot at album-making after how difficult the first one was. And soon after that, I made the decision to move to Austin, which of course would end my time with Banana Seat. (I ended up moving here a bit sooner than I planned; some of y'all know that bizarre story. A senile 89-year-old driver and a tornado were involved.) I knew I'd miss the band, but Austin was the right move for me, for a number of reasons. Still, what a five-year ride, and if it felt like a missed chance at something even greater back then, that's not the way I think of it now. I only wish I'd savored it all more.
I was bummed, of course. I needed a gig. But what I didn't know was that this would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. In February 1998, not long after, I got a phone call from a guy named Wayman, who I'd worked with briefly in shipping and receiving at the state health department - seven years (!) before. Wayman was a drummer, and he and I went to lunch together a few times, talked about music, played demo tapes for each other. I hadn't heard from him since then, so this was quite the surprise. Thank the flying spaghetti monster that I have a weird name and am thus easy to find in a phone book. Wayman told me that he had this band called Banana Seat...are you ready for this - with ELEVEN members in it, a full horn section, two female singers...the band did 70s and early 80s music, stuff with big arrangements: Chicago, Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire. A lot of that older stuff I knew and liked. My mind was blowing about then, and he mentioned that they were firing their keyboardist and invited me down to try out. Which I did, with a quickness, and got the spot.
I was going to make my debut with them in a few weeks, but after I got the tapes of the songs to learn, Wayman told me that their departing keyboardist wasn't going to be able to play that weekend. I said I'd do it. This meant learning keyboard parts to 35 songs in four days, and it wasn't just comping piano chords - I had to know the arrangements, a string part here, a synth part there, a hand clap after the guitar solo. At least well enough to get the band through the gig. I stayed up all night charting and learning songs that night. I'm sure I missed a lot of little details in that first show, but no matter. I was wondering how in the heck an 11-member band could manage to get paid playing clubs in the OKC area, and when I got to that first show I learned how: the place was packed wall-to-wall. The band was getting really popular locally just about then. So that was energizing, and even more so, the music was so fun to play! Especially on keys. It was pop, but the task was damn near as challenging as playing jazz, in a different way. Had to juggle a lot of parts on two keyboards, all while handling more patch changes live than I'd ever had to before. I was overjoyed.
I would end up playing in Banana Seat for five years, and we played a LOT. Almost every weekend, Friday and Saturday, for almost the whole time I was in the band. Oklahoma City, Norman, Tulsa, Dallas...plus lots of private parties and weddings (where the real money was made). I did close to 500 shows with the band, more than with every other band I've been in, combined. For the first three years we were at or near the very top of our local scene, as far as cover bands went. We had the top booking agency in town booking us, and we brought in a boatload of money: even after the money was divided 11 ways instead of the four or five that a typical band would have, I was still making twice or three times what I'd made in bands before then. Wasn't quite enough to live on, but not all that far off at the best of times.
What our club shows were like: we'd usually play 3-4 sets, 30-35 songs. Start at 10, quit near 2. Our audience was maybe 60-70 percent female, which I can't say I objected to. Lots of eye candy to look at from the stage. Our stage plot was unusual - Wayman, the drummer, set up front center stage, since he was also the lead singer. The four horns (two trumpets, trombone, alto sax) were on a platform behind him; the two female singers to one side of the stage, with me and the lead guitarist behind them; and the bassist and rhythm guitarist on the other side. We had lots of little period props, like a Lite-Brite and an old TV playing Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows, and lots of percussion toys all over the place. Tons of mikes, because we had five regular singers. (I wasn't one of them, but it was okay since the keyboard parts had me so busy I couldn't have covered that many backing vocals anyway.) Very often the club stages we played on were too small for us, so we were cramped onstage a lot - I can remember my back hurting after shows sometimes from being wedged in behind my keyboard rig in a less than natural position. You do what you gotta do, and besides, we often got free beer so I didn't feel the back pain until later!
The band's image was...okay, I say this lovingly, if y'all Banana Seaters are reading this, and the crowds didn't seem to mind, but jeez, we looked boring. "Network Solution Associates Business Sales Department, Midwest Region, out on happy hour" would cover it reasonably well. And we weren't making up for it with stage moves either, not that it would have been a great idea to begin with. The music spoke for us, though, and I think we did a good job choosing songs. We took pains to avoid the obvious choices - we wouldn't play the #1 hit, so much as we'd play that follow-up that peaked at #14, but that you have cool memories of. We were always getting requests for the most obvious choices - "Brick House" and "Play That Funky Music" were the most frequent ones. We never played either song; we were a cover band, but we did the covers we wanted to do.
Despite our palpable lack of a cool image, we continued to draw well enough that we got to open for some well-known 80s acts, most notably Men at Work (who were fantastic) and Rick Springfield (who wasn't). Maybe 3,000 in the audience at each show, something like that. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a serious rush to do that, but really, it's not that much different than a smaller show. You still set your gear up, play the songs on the set list taped to the stage by your feet as best you can like you rehearsed them, and then it's over and you go drink some more and talk to people and stuff.
We had some experienced songwriters in the band - Steve, the rhythm guitarist, Chris, the bassist, Wayman the drummer/lead singer, and me. About, what was it, 2000, we started playing a few originals, and we had plans to go into a nearby studio and record a CD. With the good turnouts at our shows, surely we'd sell a few, no? And I was definitely dreaming of writing originals for this band - how could I not? I mean, an 11-piece band, with horns and five or six skilled vocalists and everything, and established in a style that was a comfortable fit for my own? The band could have played the hell out of the Trembles stuff had they a mind to, though that wasn't going to happen and shouldn't have - those songs are in my voice, not theirs. And I'd be writing with other writers - good ones, but stylistically quite different, more early power-pop influenced, not jazz/soul/arena rock influenced as I was. And as fun as a lot of our material was to perform, playing mostly the same covers weekend after weekend was getting a little old, and I hungered to get back into some original music.
The Banana Seat CD, called Everything Glitters, took two years to make. If that sounds like some tooth-pulling was involved, yes, that's correct. The process was drawn out and at times contentious, and by the end of it we were kind of exhausted musically and emotionally, I suspect. One issue was that the four writers were the only ones really that enthusiastic about doing the original thing, which I wasn't happy about at the time, but looking back I understand. It's one thing to ask someone to rehearse once or twice a week, play two gigs on the weekends, have fun and get paid. It's quite another to ask someone to commit to a creative vision not their own, to the point of rehearsing all the time and playing shows full of originals for no money, which might lead to, what, regional touring - let's all get in a van and drive around busting our balls so we can play for tiny crowds in medium-small dot towns up the Pacific coast or wherever...the members of the band were older this time, and some of them were married with kids. Not sure what I was really expecting there; I'd have done all that, but I had nothing to lose. And I was unnecessarily obnoxious about a lot of creative issues, I'll freely admit. But what hurt more on a personal level is that here was a golden opportunity to show what I could do as a writer, and I really didn't back the talk with material. I have two writing credits on the 10-song album, but the number isn't the point; I had a lot of respect for the other writers in the band and was happy to have their work represented as much or more than my own. My songs are good songs, I think, but I was haunted by the thought that I had better stuff in me that I didn't get out when it mattered. And that this might be the best chance I'd ever have with a band - though that didn't really take into account the reality of the situation, either. I was past 30, with no particular successes outside of music, and the selfish sense that this would be my last best run at musical notoriety was in play as well.
We gave it a brief run, playing the songs off the album, selling a few CDs. Didn't really make a splash and we went back to our usual covers business...but there was one great adventure left even then. On the way home from a Tulsa gig, Wayman and I were talking and he mentioned there was this project organized by some musicians in other local OKC bands called the Mixtape Club. The idea was that every month or two the club would put on a show, covering the songs of one particular artist for a whole night; various bands and guest musicians would all pitch in to pull the show off. And one artist they had thought about was Steely Dan, and Banana Seat (who played some Steely Dan already) was about the only band around who could pull something like that off. Both Wayman and I are huge Steely Dan fans - sometimes after rehearsal he and I would stay after and jam on some SD...to say one thing about my friend Wayman, he's an eternal optimist. He believed we could do anything, that huge success was always just around the corner; it wasn't always, of course, but we did have a lot of success when you look back, so in many respects Wayman's been vindicated.
So anyway, we kept talking on that ride home, and what started as one or two sets, total of ten, twelve, maybe fifteen songs, became "we're going to learn three full sets of Steely Dan". And given the timetable of the project, we had two months or so to pull it off. Whoa, shit...as anyone who knows Steely Dan's music knows, it's among the most complex music ever to succeed on the pop charts. Steely Dan themselves didn't play live after their first couple of albums, and most of their classic 70s releases were done with a phalanx of ace L.A. studio musicians who rendered their jazzy tracks smooth as silk. This was another enterprise where most of the band had to be cajoled into it - we were definitely spending whatever currency we had with everybody. A ton of rehearsals, both as a full band and in sections - horns, vocals, rhythm players. There was just so much to learn, so quickly. Aside from handling all the keyboards, a daunting task in itself, my role was to write out charts for the bassist and for the horns. I'd come home every night from work and go at it, for weeks. Constantly on deadline. My chops were up, I'll say that. We had the help of a number of talented guest musicians, too, which was fun and a much-needed boost, I think. We played the Steely Dan tribute show in December 2002, and while it wasn't perfect - how could it have been - we pulled it off damn believably, and it was perhaps the most satisfying live musical experience I've ever had, bar none, even more than opening for big acts or playing in front of large crowds. The second set was the Aja album, in its entirety. We painted a backdrop of the album cover; Marnie and Melissa, our two female singers, dressed in Japanese costumes for the performance of the title track. The night ended with a sloppy but fun rendition of the complex, reharmonized Alive in America version of Reelin' in the Years. There were maybe 50-75 people in the audience, many good friends of ours and guest performers. It was a celebration, one we'd really worked hard for. I'm indebted to everyone in Banana Seat and the guest performers for the joy I got from that night - this was a collective achievement through and through.
Anyway, returning to the Banana Seat album: was it any good? I'm listening to it right now, for the first time in at least five years, probably seven...yeah, it's better than I remember it. Much better. No reason whatsoever we should be disappointed about it. In retrospect, I'm proud as hell of us. Flawed, sure, but you can hear the ambition. What we were trying to do was a bitch, and it wasn't anything like anyone else was doing at the time. There are some soaring performances; for one, Marnie's singing still just blows me away. And the writing's pretty damn good. I love a lot of the vocal arrangements - we had so many good singers in the band. I'm at least a credible rock singer, and I was probably the fifth or sixth-best vocalist among us, put it that way. It's hard to quantify what's missing - a prominent thought I had in the past hour is "what would this album have been if we'd had a producer and recorded in a better studio". That's not to insult our engineer, and maybe that situation couldn't have come about...but some bright spark could have really spun a gem from the best parts of this record. The raw materials were there.
In early 2003, I found myself newly inspired to come up with some songs for a possible second Banana Seat album. We didn't make another album, but we did play a few of those songs live. I definitely felt a sense of too little, too late - these were among the best pop-flavored songs I think I've ever written, but it seemed unlikely that we'd take another shot at album-making after how difficult the first one was. And soon after that, I made the decision to move to Austin, which of course would end my time with Banana Seat. (I ended up moving here a bit sooner than I planned; some of y'all know that bizarre story. A senile 89-year-old driver and a tornado were involved.) I knew I'd miss the band, but Austin was the right move for me, for a number of reasons. Still, what a five-year ride, and if it felt like a missed chance at something even greater back then, that's not the way I think of it now. I only wish I'd savored it all more.
My Musical Life - Part 7
As for my music listening habits, the mid-90s was about when I stopped buying or listening to much current music. I was into all this older stuff deeply, for one, and I had limited funds to buy albums, for two. I could buy older albums cheap in bargain bins, used stores, garage sales. Hey, a lot of that old stuff was new to me...and the prevailing 90s styles didn't really excite me - some of it's better in retrospect, to be fair. But I thought most grunge was kind of drab, the punk revival didn't grab me since I wasn't all that into punk before, I'm not really a hip-hop guy, easy listening got less easy, R & B often became a contest of which diva could oversing more egregiously, boy bands, uh, no, Billy Ray Cyrus, uh, god no...remember when I compared delicious chords and harmonic progressions to chocolate sundaes earlier? To my ears, there were fewer chocolate sundaes in the popular music of the 90s, as a whole, than before or since.
But wait a minute: you or I could just as easily make the same list of criticisms I just did above for any other decade or era of popular music, including our favorite one. There has always been plenty of music we find mediocre or even bad, and there will always be. And the same is true for the good stuff. The reason I've long favored music from the 70s and 80s isn't that it's "better". It just, I dunno, fits me.
***
So in early 1996 I wasn't playing with anyone, and I was living in Norman, and my friend Dean with the huge record collection had moved there also. He was rooming with Chance, who also played guitar and wrote songs. Dean had just gotten out of a band himself, a hippie jam band who'd had a pretty good run...he and Chance had written some songs, and I hung out there some, and eventually we had a band together called the Green Owls. Very different than any of the music I'd been playing for years - much more in the spirit of what Dean and I had played together long before. Whimsical, alternative, psychedelic...the Green Owl himself was a mysterious all-knowing being, as we explained to our audiences in our titular song. Dean played his sweet Les Paul guitar with his 60s tape-echo unit and other vintage effects, Chance played acoustic guitar, I played bass. We had two drummers (not at the same time), first John, then Adrian. We didn't play together that long - maybe fifteen shows? Don't remember exactly.
I didn't write a lot for the band - just one song, "Taking Psychology With You", with lyrics cribbed from a college psych text. Tried to write more but I had a hard time getting a handle on the style - mostly simple guitar chords at its base, but with a good sense of melody and pacing and quirky, memorable lyrics. We'd do some extended jamming live sometimes, ten or fifteen minute stretches, Dean's swooping array of sound effects leading the way. His rig and playing sound nothing remotely like anyone else's I've ever played with, and that's a big compliment. We weren't the tightest band, and I'm not sure I did that well fitting into the band concept, but I enjoyed the hell out of being a Green Owl. And a lot of the fan base were old friends of ours and their friends, so I got to meet and re-meet a lot of cool people. If there's ever a reunion show, I'll drive all night to be there. And, I promise, no Michael Jackson impressions.
The next while after that was mostly spent unsuccessfully trying to get another jazz thing going with Gary (he and I were fine, but our prospective bandmates were flaky as hell and it didn't materialize), doing a few fill-in gigs, trying to get a Trembles thing together with no luck...kind of a dead period for music overall. Wasn't even putting a lot of scratch-pad ideas down.
***
But in the summer of 1997, Gary told me about quite an opportunity: he'd gotten scholarship money, yes, actual money, to join the University of Central Oklahoma jazz ensemble. And I could try out and get the same deal. I sure needed to do *something*, and going back to school was something I wanted to do anyway, and there was financial help, and I'd never played with a big band before...yeah, I jumped at the chance. I went up to Edmond (north of OKC) to the university, auditioned and got accepted. UCO had three jazz ensembles, about 20-25 members each. I played electric bass in the first band, sharing the bass chair with an upright player (I'd never played upright bass, though I did take a semester of lessons on it when I was there), and I played piano in the second band. I also played guitar on a song here and there. Gary played in multiple bands as well. A lot of rehearsals. The year culminated in a successful performance for the bands at Wichita. UCO, while not a monster program like North Texas, is a very respectable jazz program and I met a lot of talented players and teachers there.
Being in the UCO jazz program was a new world for me in many ways. While I'd played in fusion bands for a few years that occasionally veered toward traditional jazz, and I'd worked through a voicings book or two, I'd never really played or listened to much traditional jazz. My natural playing style tends to be jazzy anyway, so the musical vocabulary was easy to dive into, but I didn't have the history; I didn't know the literature. A lot of the lingo was foreign to me. And my reading chops were rusty as hell, though they improved quickly by having to do it so often. There was so much to learn - it all depended on what I wanted to apply myself to.
I could have stayed at UCO, spent a whole lot of time playing music, gotten a bachelor's and more, embedded myself in musical academia. One could argue well that I should have. I'm not really sure why I didn't, but I was there only a year and part of another. Coming off the street from a commercial music background as I did, I found the academic music environment drastically different, though I wouldn't say that's why I didn't stick with it.
There's something museum-like about the way educational institutions handle "serious" music. Hidebound, over-reverent to the tradition. I've always thought that about the way our schools and cultural organizations tend to treat classical music, which I like but have never regularly listened to. What do a lot of people think of when they hear the words "classical music"? High culture. Rich, stuffy patrons; snobs; old people, old culture. Played by people in tuxedos with normal hair. Introduced on the radio by speakers with perfect diction and the expressive palette of golf announcers. Listen to this music because, like your vegetables, it's good for you. And even after you learn that that's absolutely NOT what classical music is, it's hard to undo the associations in your mind when you hear the music, and it's distracting, and worse, misleading. And collegiate jazz programs run the risk, stunningly given the anything but highbrow story of the evolution of jazz, of ossifying the music that same way.
I don't believe in the distinction between "serious" and "popular" music myself, not at all. That's cultural baggage, not music; the suits, not the people in them. There's nothing necessarily more staid and dignified and whatnot about a big-band piece or a classical piece than there is a heavy metal song or a rap song. You think classical music can't inspire people to base passions? People frickin' rioted when Stravinsky premiered "The Rite of Spring". Jazz was controversial as hell too, and there were a lot of attempts way back when to harass jazz musicians and suppress their music. It's bizarre to see the pained, transcendent art of an inner-city black man from the 1940s who died of a heroin overdose flattened into a pedagogic objective.
So anyway, the academic music world struck me as a bit insular and weird, but also amazing in that there's just so much to study and that's where you'd go to do it. The history and theory of music are fascinating, deep areas of inquiry. Besides, at school you can hole up in a practice room and really lose yourself, in the best sense of the phrase.
But wait a minute: you or I could just as easily make the same list of criticisms I just did above for any other decade or era of popular music, including our favorite one. There has always been plenty of music we find mediocre or even bad, and there will always be. And the same is true for the good stuff. The reason I've long favored music from the 70s and 80s isn't that it's "better". It just, I dunno, fits me.
***
So in early 1996 I wasn't playing with anyone, and I was living in Norman, and my friend Dean with the huge record collection had moved there also. He was rooming with Chance, who also played guitar and wrote songs. Dean had just gotten out of a band himself, a hippie jam band who'd had a pretty good run...he and Chance had written some songs, and I hung out there some, and eventually we had a band together called the Green Owls. Very different than any of the music I'd been playing for years - much more in the spirit of what Dean and I had played together long before. Whimsical, alternative, psychedelic...the Green Owl himself was a mysterious all-knowing being, as we explained to our audiences in our titular song. Dean played his sweet Les Paul guitar with his 60s tape-echo unit and other vintage effects, Chance played acoustic guitar, I played bass. We had two drummers (not at the same time), first John, then Adrian. We didn't play together that long - maybe fifteen shows? Don't remember exactly.
I didn't write a lot for the band - just one song, "Taking Psychology With You", with lyrics cribbed from a college psych text. Tried to write more but I had a hard time getting a handle on the style - mostly simple guitar chords at its base, but with a good sense of melody and pacing and quirky, memorable lyrics. We'd do some extended jamming live sometimes, ten or fifteen minute stretches, Dean's swooping array of sound effects leading the way. His rig and playing sound nothing remotely like anyone else's I've ever played with, and that's a big compliment. We weren't the tightest band, and I'm not sure I did that well fitting into the band concept, but I enjoyed the hell out of being a Green Owl. And a lot of the fan base were old friends of ours and their friends, so I got to meet and re-meet a lot of cool people. If there's ever a reunion show, I'll drive all night to be there. And, I promise, no Michael Jackson impressions.
The next while after that was mostly spent unsuccessfully trying to get another jazz thing going with Gary (he and I were fine, but our prospective bandmates were flaky as hell and it didn't materialize), doing a few fill-in gigs, trying to get a Trembles thing together with no luck...kind of a dead period for music overall. Wasn't even putting a lot of scratch-pad ideas down.
***
But in the summer of 1997, Gary told me about quite an opportunity: he'd gotten scholarship money, yes, actual money, to join the University of Central Oklahoma jazz ensemble. And I could try out and get the same deal. I sure needed to do *something*, and going back to school was something I wanted to do anyway, and there was financial help, and I'd never played with a big band before...yeah, I jumped at the chance. I went up to Edmond (north of OKC) to the university, auditioned and got accepted. UCO had three jazz ensembles, about 20-25 members each. I played electric bass in the first band, sharing the bass chair with an upright player (I'd never played upright bass, though I did take a semester of lessons on it when I was there), and I played piano in the second band. I also played guitar on a song here and there. Gary played in multiple bands as well. A lot of rehearsals. The year culminated in a successful performance for the bands at Wichita. UCO, while not a monster program like North Texas, is a very respectable jazz program and I met a lot of talented players and teachers there.
Being in the UCO jazz program was a new world for me in many ways. While I'd played in fusion bands for a few years that occasionally veered toward traditional jazz, and I'd worked through a voicings book or two, I'd never really played or listened to much traditional jazz. My natural playing style tends to be jazzy anyway, so the musical vocabulary was easy to dive into, but I didn't have the history; I didn't know the literature. A lot of the lingo was foreign to me. And my reading chops were rusty as hell, though they improved quickly by having to do it so often. There was so much to learn - it all depended on what I wanted to apply myself to.
I could have stayed at UCO, spent a whole lot of time playing music, gotten a bachelor's and more, embedded myself in musical academia. One could argue well that I should have. I'm not really sure why I didn't, but I was there only a year and part of another. Coming off the street from a commercial music background as I did, I found the academic music environment drastically different, though I wouldn't say that's why I didn't stick with it.
There's something museum-like about the way educational institutions handle "serious" music. Hidebound, over-reverent to the tradition. I've always thought that about the way our schools and cultural organizations tend to treat classical music, which I like but have never regularly listened to. What do a lot of people think of when they hear the words "classical music"? High culture. Rich, stuffy patrons; snobs; old people, old culture. Played by people in tuxedos with normal hair. Introduced on the radio by speakers with perfect diction and the expressive palette of golf announcers. Listen to this music because, like your vegetables, it's good for you. And even after you learn that that's absolutely NOT what classical music is, it's hard to undo the associations in your mind when you hear the music, and it's distracting, and worse, misleading. And collegiate jazz programs run the risk, stunningly given the anything but highbrow story of the evolution of jazz, of ossifying the music that same way.
I don't believe in the distinction between "serious" and "popular" music myself, not at all. That's cultural baggage, not music; the suits, not the people in them. There's nothing necessarily more staid and dignified and whatnot about a big-band piece or a classical piece than there is a heavy metal song or a rap song. You think classical music can't inspire people to base passions? People frickin' rioted when Stravinsky premiered "The Rite of Spring". Jazz was controversial as hell too, and there were a lot of attempts way back when to harass jazz musicians and suppress their music. It's bizarre to see the pained, transcendent art of an inner-city black man from the 1940s who died of a heroin overdose flattened into a pedagogic objective.
So anyway, the academic music world struck me as a bit insular and weird, but also amazing in that there's just so much to study and that's where you'd go to do it. The history and theory of music are fascinating, deep areas of inquiry. Besides, at school you can hole up in a practice room and really lose yourself, in the best sense of the phrase.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
My Musical Life - Part 6
So in 1994, I'd started writing music in a jazz-influenced rock and soul vein. I continued to bide my time and write in the first half of 1995, and a certain corner was turned - a passel of songs were coming together the way I liked, and I didn't lose the inspiration halfway in. I continued to do fill-in type gigs here and there when I wasn't working (I had a job as an inventory counter, which involved a lot of travel and weird hours), but for the most part my mind was on these new songs. I mentioned to Gary that I was looking for a way to record these songs for real, and he had a friend from whom we could borrow an ADAT digital 8-track recorder for $20 a day. Gary agreed to help me on the project and let me use his home studio room to record in...I'd already picked out a band name to record under: The Trembles. I liked the "The (Noun)s" construction - reminded me of 70s soul groups - and the vaguely unsettled sound of it matched the troubled cast of a lot of the lyrics.
Starting in the late summer of 1995, I think, I would go over to Gary's place, about 40 miles away across town (OKC is huge), once or twice a week to spend all day recording. At home, I'd stay up late at night building and editing the drum and keyboard parts in Cakewalk, a computer sequencing program. All the other parts were done live: bass, guitars, vocals, Gary's sax. Originally I had 11 songs planned, but one of them wasn't working so I cut back to 10. The project took many months, as scheduling was always tricky. We finished it up in early '96.
This project took a lot of work, both on my part and Gary's part, and it was exactly what I wanted to be doing then and immensely satisfying to complete. How did it turn out? Well...I wanted to achieve something commercially releasable, something I wouldn't have to make any excuses for. Given that it was a home ADAT recording, that would have been very tough to achieve. Basically, they're demos - much slaved-over demos, but still at demo quality. Another problem plaguing the 1995 Trembles was the vocals: I had never done much lead singing before that and didn't really know much about vocal technique, and the parts I wrote were sometimes tougher than I could pull off, and my intonation wasn't on sometimes. Gary's sax solos on the project were gorgeous, though, and I like most of the songs and a lot of my playing on it even now. And more than that, it was the first completed project I'd ever done that, warts and all, was truly in my voice as a musician and songwriter. I've wanted to redo those songs one way or another ever since - they're me.
I owe many debts of gratitude to my good friend Gary, but his helping me realize the Trembles project is among the very biggest of them. This music, which I hold as dear as life, simply wouldn't have gotten made without him.
So now I had a full album's worth of music on hand - what next? I didn't have any money to get CDs made to sell, not that that would have been the best idea anyway. I sort of tried to recruit a band to play it, but quickly grew discouraged and didn't try that hard. (Gary chose not to continue with the project, which was absolutely fine - he'd already contributed so much.)
The aftermath was kind of a letdown. I mean, friends liked the music when I played it for them, it wasn't that, but I just had no way to go forward. The style of the music was hardly what was commercially popular at the time; the only time music that sounded like the Trembles might have sold was the mid-to-late 1970s, though occasionally an anachronistic artist sneaks through. The almost-guaranteed non-hit music was all I could offer to prospective band members: I had no industry connections, no gigs lined up, no money. And the music, while not requiring virtuosos, wasn't easy to play and would require a lot of rehearsal. Building a band in this case would have been difficult even for someone who was an experienced band leader and promoter, and I was neither of those. And I started writing for a follow-up, but inspiration wasn't coming. So while I kept it in mind to take another shot at recording the Trembles songs better when I got the opportunity, at the time it looked like the Trembles would be resting on the shelf for quite a while.
Starting in the late summer of 1995, I think, I would go over to Gary's place, about 40 miles away across town (OKC is huge), once or twice a week to spend all day recording. At home, I'd stay up late at night building and editing the drum and keyboard parts in Cakewalk, a computer sequencing program. All the other parts were done live: bass, guitars, vocals, Gary's sax. Originally I had 11 songs planned, but one of them wasn't working so I cut back to 10. The project took many months, as scheduling was always tricky. We finished it up in early '96.
This project took a lot of work, both on my part and Gary's part, and it was exactly what I wanted to be doing then and immensely satisfying to complete. How did it turn out? Well...I wanted to achieve something commercially releasable, something I wouldn't have to make any excuses for. Given that it was a home ADAT recording, that would have been very tough to achieve. Basically, they're demos - much slaved-over demos, but still at demo quality. Another problem plaguing the 1995 Trembles was the vocals: I had never done much lead singing before that and didn't really know much about vocal technique, and the parts I wrote were sometimes tougher than I could pull off, and my intonation wasn't on sometimes. Gary's sax solos on the project were gorgeous, though, and I like most of the songs and a lot of my playing on it even now. And more than that, it was the first completed project I'd ever done that, warts and all, was truly in my voice as a musician and songwriter. I've wanted to redo those songs one way or another ever since - they're me.
I owe many debts of gratitude to my good friend Gary, but his helping me realize the Trembles project is among the very biggest of them. This music, which I hold as dear as life, simply wouldn't have gotten made without him.
So now I had a full album's worth of music on hand - what next? I didn't have any money to get CDs made to sell, not that that would have been the best idea anyway. I sort of tried to recruit a band to play it, but quickly grew discouraged and didn't try that hard. (Gary chose not to continue with the project, which was absolutely fine - he'd already contributed so much.)
The aftermath was kind of a letdown. I mean, friends liked the music when I played it for them, it wasn't that, but I just had no way to go forward. The style of the music was hardly what was commercially popular at the time; the only time music that sounded like the Trembles might have sold was the mid-to-late 1970s, though occasionally an anachronistic artist sneaks through. The almost-guaranteed non-hit music was all I could offer to prospective band members: I had no industry connections, no gigs lined up, no money. And the music, while not requiring virtuosos, wasn't easy to play and would require a lot of rehearsal. Building a band in this case would have been difficult even for someone who was an experienced band leader and promoter, and I was neither of those. And I started writing for a follow-up, but inspiration wasn't coming. So while I kept it in mind to take another shot at recording the Trembles songs better when I got the opportunity, at the time it looked like the Trembles would be resting on the shelf for quite a while.
My Musical Life - Part 5
So Middleman broke up in June 1992, and I was at a loss for what to do next. I would have been most happy to keep making music with Gary, the saxophonist - we'd become good friends and really dug each other's sound. But Gary decided to head out to L.A. to try his luck. For the rest of the year, I did pick-up gigs here and there, including a stint on keys in a blues band, and wrote some more music. You'd think I'd have kept writing contemporary jazz, since I'd made the switch from rock comfortably while in Middleman and had been studying a lot of jazz at home. I did a little of that, but mostly I went back to writing hard somewhat progressive rock and metal. I'd become a big King's X fan, and that influenced what I was writing in late '92 and early '93. The material was broadly more '90s sounding that what I'd been writing a few years before, because I was still keeping up with current trends in music pretty well.
I wrote maybe seven or eight hard rock tunes, but I didn't have anywhere to go with them - I wasn't playing with a band, and I was having financial trouble and couldn't afford to get a good enough guitar rig to take this stuff to the stage anyway. But Gary had returned to town from L.A. in early '93, and he'd started working with a bass player, Mike, that he'd been playing with before Middleman. That band was called Flashpoint, and did the same sort of material Middleman did (excepting Middleman's vocal tunes) - the main difference was that Flashpoint used sequenced tracks onstage. So Gary and Mike were resurrecting Flashpoint, and the drummer John from Middleman joined up and so did I. Sort of a Middleman II, with me playing both guitar and keys instead of just keys. We wrote a few new tracks, but most of the stuff we played was Mike's since he'd already sequenced the backing tracks to it. We also did jazz covers, some cool stuff - Miles, John Scofield, Herbie Hancock; Flashpoint got closer at times to actual jazz than Middleman ever really did. We didn't practice a lot, but we played a lot of dinnertime gigs at a couple of different restaurants. We talked occasionally about going further, we went into the studio to record a few songs once, we had a few feelers from various regional and national acts looking for backing bands that didn't come through...overall it was an enjoyable gig. Gary's sax playing was getting monstrously good - just sharing a stage with him was enough to make the venture worthwhile for me. And I liked getting to play musician's music on multiple instruments.
The other thing I started doing more of about this time is fill-in gigs. Now that I'd played with a few bands, more people knew me, so I'd get some of those calls, and I pretty much always needed the money. My ability to learn quickly by ear was a big help here, as was being able to play guitar, keys or bass as needed. Over the years I filled in doing a little of a lot of different things: reggae, country, rap, Latin, R & B, straight-ahead jazz, blues, rock....I didn't do everything all that well, but I could fake it well enough in a pinch. A utility infielder.
I only wrote a little bit for Flashpoint - my jazz writing was really feeling blocked. But in late 1993, I did start a new writing project at home. Wrote and recorded five songs in about a month, which is a whole lot for me. The music for the new songs was hard rock, but not guitar rock: it was done entirely with my two synthesizers and effects pedals. Lots of wild, busy parts. The craziest of the bunch was a song called Alpha Male, which featured a sequenced bass line at breakneck tempos, samples from a radio preacher, barked spoken-word vocals (some might call it rapping, but I wouldn't), heavily distorted harmonized keyboard comping and leads...gruesome fun, way over the top. I'm not sure it was even playable live. Another one I wish I still had a copy of and might remake sometime...the project as a whole fired me up again musically.
The lyrics for the music I wrote in 1993 were often scathingly cynical, not that cheery jingles emerge from me in the best of times. I'd had a relationship go bad early in the year, and I had money problems, and the whole year hurt like hell.
Back to the all-synth project, I had the thought that I'd like to finish this project and then get a band together to play it...but as with other projects before, that didn't happen. The next year, year and half was a lot of drifting. I ran out of good ideas and motivation for the synth project, and I found my tastes going further into 70s funk and soul (regular and blue-eyed). Isley Brothers, late 70s Hall and Oates, the O'Jays, the Spinners, Boz Scaggs, Stevie Wonder. Also listened to a lot of mid-70s Black Sabbath. What that cloud of music suggested to me was a dusty, desperate, resigned sort of sound. And I was getting pretty used to the feeling of resignation about then...in '94 I did a lot of scratch-pad demos at home, just brainstorming, and what started coming out was a cross between those soulful sounds, with some Steely Dan influence thrown in, and my usual harder guitar rock sound (though with a more classic, bluesier, less metallic tone). I got the sense even in the earliest days of that brainstorming that I might at last be finding my voice as a composer. Up to that point I'd tried many styles but none really seemed to be uniquely me.
I wrote maybe seven or eight hard rock tunes, but I didn't have anywhere to go with them - I wasn't playing with a band, and I was having financial trouble and couldn't afford to get a good enough guitar rig to take this stuff to the stage anyway. But Gary had returned to town from L.A. in early '93, and he'd started working with a bass player, Mike, that he'd been playing with before Middleman. That band was called Flashpoint, and did the same sort of material Middleman did (excepting Middleman's vocal tunes) - the main difference was that Flashpoint used sequenced tracks onstage. So Gary and Mike were resurrecting Flashpoint, and the drummer John from Middleman joined up and so did I. Sort of a Middleman II, with me playing both guitar and keys instead of just keys. We wrote a few new tracks, but most of the stuff we played was Mike's since he'd already sequenced the backing tracks to it. We also did jazz covers, some cool stuff - Miles, John Scofield, Herbie Hancock; Flashpoint got closer at times to actual jazz than Middleman ever really did. We didn't practice a lot, but we played a lot of dinnertime gigs at a couple of different restaurants. We talked occasionally about going further, we went into the studio to record a few songs once, we had a few feelers from various regional and national acts looking for backing bands that didn't come through...overall it was an enjoyable gig. Gary's sax playing was getting monstrously good - just sharing a stage with him was enough to make the venture worthwhile for me. And I liked getting to play musician's music on multiple instruments.
The other thing I started doing more of about this time is fill-in gigs. Now that I'd played with a few bands, more people knew me, so I'd get some of those calls, and I pretty much always needed the money. My ability to learn quickly by ear was a big help here, as was being able to play guitar, keys or bass as needed. Over the years I filled in doing a little of a lot of different things: reggae, country, rap, Latin, R & B, straight-ahead jazz, blues, rock....I didn't do everything all that well, but I could fake it well enough in a pinch. A utility infielder.
I only wrote a little bit for Flashpoint - my jazz writing was really feeling blocked. But in late 1993, I did start a new writing project at home. Wrote and recorded five songs in about a month, which is a whole lot for me. The music for the new songs was hard rock, but not guitar rock: it was done entirely with my two synthesizers and effects pedals. Lots of wild, busy parts. The craziest of the bunch was a song called Alpha Male, which featured a sequenced bass line at breakneck tempos, samples from a radio preacher, barked spoken-word vocals (some might call it rapping, but I wouldn't), heavily distorted harmonized keyboard comping and leads...gruesome fun, way over the top. I'm not sure it was even playable live. Another one I wish I still had a copy of and might remake sometime...the project as a whole fired me up again musically.
The lyrics for the music I wrote in 1993 were often scathingly cynical, not that cheery jingles emerge from me in the best of times. I'd had a relationship go bad early in the year, and I had money problems, and the whole year hurt like hell.
Back to the all-synth project, I had the thought that I'd like to finish this project and then get a band together to play it...but as with other projects before, that didn't happen. The next year, year and half was a lot of drifting. I ran out of good ideas and motivation for the synth project, and I found my tastes going further into 70s funk and soul (regular and blue-eyed). Isley Brothers, late 70s Hall and Oates, the O'Jays, the Spinners, Boz Scaggs, Stevie Wonder. Also listened to a lot of mid-70s Black Sabbath. What that cloud of music suggested to me was a dusty, desperate, resigned sort of sound. And I was getting pretty used to the feeling of resignation about then...in '94 I did a lot of scratch-pad demos at home, just brainstorming, and what started coming out was a cross between those soulful sounds, with some Steely Dan influence thrown in, and my usual harder guitar rock sound (though with a more classic, bluesier, less metallic tone). I got the sense even in the earliest days of that brainstorming that I might at last be finding my voice as a composer. Up to that point I'd tried many styles but none really seemed to be uniquely me.
My Musical Life - Part 4
So as explained last time, in the four years after high school, I played in two bar bands. The bands did almost all covers, but that doesn't mean I wasn't writing music. Wasn't near as prolific as I wanted to be, but I did manage a few pieces. Some were pop and rock of a sort that the band I was in might conceivably play, though that didn't happen much. Others were farther afield, incorporating other influences both established (metal, prog) and emerging (funk, R&B, contemporary jazz, electronic music)...a couple of big influences I picked up during this period were Steely Dan and Todd Rundgren. It's not hard to hear why I would like both of them: each uses an unusually sophisticated harmonic vocabulary for rock, and my ears love both parts of that equation. A backbeat groove and delicious chords make me happy like a chocolate sundae does. And by learning a lot of that music, I widened my own harmonic vocabulary further, and it was already pretty wide for a rock player.
***
While I enjoyed playing in the bands I was in, I was also getting restless. A lot of the straight-ahead rock covers we played were the sort of songs a thousand other bands in a thousand other cities might play. We gave the audience what they wanted, and had a great time doing it, and that's fine, but after a few years I needed to branch out and do more of what inspired me to play music in the first place.
The second of those bands, Changes, had about run its course near the end of 1991. We'd gotten a new female singer, Sherri, though we played just a few shows with her. She too had an excellent voice, though she didn't have much club experience (busy raising three sons) and thus tended to be timider onstage than a more comfortable performer would be. She and I got along well and even got together a couple of times for writing sessions, figuring we might want to work together sometime in the future. But then we didn't talk for a while, so the possibility wasn't really much in my mind.
One Saturday night in late December of 1991, I was about to go out for the evening when the phone rang. It was Sherri; she told me a bunch of guys were coming over the next afternoon to jam around and invited me to join in, and I said sure, sounds good, I'll bring my keyboards. Sherri's husband Danny I'd met a few times; he was a very technically adept guitarist who worked as a guitar teacher. The other guys I hadn't: there was John on drums, Will on bass, and Gary on sax. John was a short Puerto Rican guy from New York who had gone to Berklee and had an extensive background in jazz and Afro-Cuban drum styles; Will was a big black guy who could do slap bass mind-bogglingly well; Gary was a young long-haired guy like me who even then had an astonishingly mature and melodic alto sax style, with a strong flavor of David Sanborn. (Everyone in the room was 30ish except Gary and me, 24 and 21 at the time respectively.) I remember the day well, down to the fact that I was wearing my Washington Redskins T-shirt. They ended up winning the Super Bowl that year!
We set up in the cramped room and John kicked off an upbeat groove - a really funky, seriously sick groove, of the sort I'd never played along with except when playing to albums with world-class funk drummers - and the five of us jammed it out for about ten minutes. When we were done, we all just sort of stared in stunned silence for a bit; we'd clicked far, far beyond anything any of us imagined. It felt like flying. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the afternoon doing more of the same, and finished the day excitedly talking about what to do next.
We became the band Middleman. Was that name taken from the name of the Living Colour song? I don't remember - might have been. We started practicing and recording ourselves constantly. In a few weeks we were recording an all-original demo and playing our first short show, in a theater on the OU campus; in a couple of months we were in the studio recording a full-length album and generating some buzz with our very energetic live club shows. That was March - by April we had another quite different gig on the calendar: through a connection we had, we got invited to play a lunchtime concert at the Yamaha R and D center in Manhattan. This flood of big news was coming so fast that we joked about MNN, the Middleman News Network. We made the grueling 30-hour van trip to New York, played the show and got a lot of positive response. There was a lot of talk amongst ourselves of possibly moving to New York and trying to break through the jazz scene there.
By June, the band had broken up. We had a lot of volatile personalities, mine included, and everything was happening so fast. I can't and won't try to speak for anyone else in the band, but I know I bought our hype 100%. I thought, yeah, we're going to break out, we're going to go national, international, this feels too good, this has got to be destiny. There were signs both in our music and in ourselves that it wasn't going to play out like that, but in the moment and being as young as I was, I didn't really understand. We had a boatload of talent, though it needed a lot more polishing than we realized, and no shortage of collective confidence. Maybe if we'd stayed together much longer and all been on the same page we'd have made something really special, I don't know. The end was quite a letdown from how it all felt a few months prior, but I didn't take it too hard - by that point it was clear we couldn't make the band work, so we were better off moving on to other projects.
***
While I enjoyed playing in the bands I was in, I was also getting restless. A lot of the straight-ahead rock covers we played were the sort of songs a thousand other bands in a thousand other cities might play. We gave the audience what they wanted, and had a great time doing it, and that's fine, but after a few years I needed to branch out and do more of what inspired me to play music in the first place.
The second of those bands, Changes, had about run its course near the end of 1991. We'd gotten a new female singer, Sherri, though we played just a few shows with her. She too had an excellent voice, though she didn't have much club experience (busy raising three sons) and thus tended to be timider onstage than a more comfortable performer would be. She and I got along well and even got together a couple of times for writing sessions, figuring we might want to work together sometime in the future. But then we didn't talk for a while, so the possibility wasn't really much in my mind.
One Saturday night in late December of 1991, I was about to go out for the evening when the phone rang. It was Sherri; she told me a bunch of guys were coming over the next afternoon to jam around and invited me to join in, and I said sure, sounds good, I'll bring my keyboards. Sherri's husband Danny I'd met a few times; he was a very technically adept guitarist who worked as a guitar teacher. The other guys I hadn't: there was John on drums, Will on bass, and Gary on sax. John was a short Puerto Rican guy from New York who had gone to Berklee and had an extensive background in jazz and Afro-Cuban drum styles; Will was a big black guy who could do slap bass mind-bogglingly well; Gary was a young long-haired guy like me who even then had an astonishingly mature and melodic alto sax style, with a strong flavor of David Sanborn. (Everyone in the room was 30ish except Gary and me, 24 and 21 at the time respectively.) I remember the day well, down to the fact that I was wearing my Washington Redskins T-shirt. They ended up winning the Super Bowl that year!
We set up in the cramped room and John kicked off an upbeat groove - a really funky, seriously sick groove, of the sort I'd never played along with except when playing to albums with world-class funk drummers - and the five of us jammed it out for about ten minutes. When we were done, we all just sort of stared in stunned silence for a bit; we'd clicked far, far beyond anything any of us imagined. It felt like flying. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the afternoon doing more of the same, and finished the day excitedly talking about what to do next.
We became the band Middleman. Was that name taken from the name of the Living Colour song? I don't remember - might have been. We started practicing and recording ourselves constantly. In a few weeks we were recording an all-original demo and playing our first short show, in a theater on the OU campus; in a couple of months we were in the studio recording a full-length album and generating some buzz with our very energetic live club shows. That was March - by April we had another quite different gig on the calendar: through a connection we had, we got invited to play a lunchtime concert at the Yamaha R and D center in Manhattan. This flood of big news was coming so fast that we joked about MNN, the Middleman News Network. We made the grueling 30-hour van trip to New York, played the show and got a lot of positive response. There was a lot of talk amongst ourselves of possibly moving to New York and trying to break through the jazz scene there.
By June, the band had broken up. We had a lot of volatile personalities, mine included, and everything was happening so fast. I can't and won't try to speak for anyone else in the band, but I know I bought our hype 100%. I thought, yeah, we're going to break out, we're going to go national, international, this feels too good, this has got to be destiny. There were signs both in our music and in ourselves that it wasn't going to play out like that, but in the moment and being as young as I was, I didn't really understand. We had a boatload of talent, though it needed a lot more polishing than we realized, and no shortage of collective confidence. Maybe if we'd stayed together much longer and all been on the same page we'd have made something really special, I don't know. The end was quite a letdown from how it all felt a few months prior, but I didn't take it too hard - by that point it was clear we couldn't make the band work, so we were better off moving on to other projects.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
My Musical Life - Part 3
Other threads: While in summer school with the other bad kids in 1987, I was in a class with Dean. He was also a guitarist and music fanatic, and we hit it off well. Dean was a record collector - even then, his collection of LPs was in the high three figures, and it would go much higher in the future. His style of guitar was quite different from mine; he was sufficiently a rocker, but he knew about older music, different music, stuff I'd not been exposed to. We hung out fairly often over the following years, and I got my first exposure to a great many artists that became huge influences on my music from hearing records in Dean's collection. Todd Rundgren, Sly Stone, Steely Dan...my god. And even the stuff that didn't directly make it into my style, the stuff that was more Dean than me, broadened my musical mind a great deal. We wrote together, too. One time we recorded four acoustic guitar songs with lyrics stolen from a book of Oklahoma feminist poetry he'd kiped from his high school library. Seriously. Two 18-year-old longhaired white kids singing lyrics like "one nipple erect; one inverted" while trading tequila shots - c'mon, have a heart, you gotta love that. And later, on two feverish nights we recorded with a borrowed Casio keyboard and Dean's Les Paul a seven-song instrumental project called White Pope. Dean is nothing if not a master archivist, and sure enough, he built a White Pope MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/whitepope666 has our besotted handiwork, a gentle mix of prefab funk and folk that was anything but intuitive in the musical climate of 1988. Hanging out and playing and listening to music with my friend Dean got my musical self thinking in ways I never would have otherwise, that's for sure, and I'm hugely thankful for that.
***
In the fall of 1988, I was at the apartment of a guy named Tom who I was in music theory class with in high school. (I need to write about that class sometime, but not now. A world-famous musician was in the class, but it was neither Tom nor me, nor is this musician's fame in pop and rock. And the band Slayer played a central role in the story.) I was dicking around on his Casio keyboard - dicking well, I might add; I always had a knack for dicking around, understand - and Tom, a drummer, mentioned that he was playing with a pop and rock cover band called the Scene who were looking for a keyboardist. A couple of weeks later I was in the band. Fortunately someone else there had a keyboard, because I didn't yet own one. Tom ended up getting fired by the band a few weeks after I joined, but I stayed with them for a couple of years. The bassist, lead singer and de facto band leader was a buff guy named Danny, a year older than me. Very talented musician, played multiple instruments well and had a strong voice...I also played rhythm guitar and some lead in the band. The band had three or four guys who played multiple instruments, and we did the instrument-switching trick a lot, probably enough to cross over the silliness line but hey, we were young. And as was true in most bands I've been in, I was the youngest.
We did a nice mix of late 80s radio pop and rock, I think - well balanced between the rockier side and the poppier side. From the keyboard perspective, I actually liked the poppier side better, even when I wasn't crazy about the material. (I could live without hearing "Wild, Wild West" again.) I remember we worked up Depeche Mode's "Behind the Wheel" - a stretch for us, but what a great song and one where I was the musical pilot, controlling the underlying rhythm loop and playing the keyboard parts...I got my first keyboard in 1989, from a classified ad. It was a Roland D-20, the workstation version of the better-known D-50. Got it cheap from a guy in Shawnee who had to get rid of it. I would end up playing probably, jeez, seven or eight hundred gigs with that thing.
The Scene was the band with which I played my first bar gig. Four hours, didn't make jack, but breakfast at Denny's or wherever it was afterward was mighty tasty. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was played. We gigged maybe, I don't know, an average of once or twice a month while I was in the band. The talent was there for a much higher ascent in the local scene, no doubt in my mind, we had a lot of skills in the fold. Maybe it was just that we were all so young, 18-22. We couldn't play some places because some of us weren't 21...the band went through a few lineup changes and a name change, to Mirror Image. We went more classic rock for a while. We did a few originals - Danny was a prolific writer, I had a couple, the drummer Trace wrote as well - but we never got to the point where we were focusing on that. Though we did record a four-song original demo, which was my first experience in a recording studio. I enjoyed it; I was particularly happy with a sweet sub-Steve Lukather melodic guitar solo I contributed to a power ballad-ish song of Danny's about his then-girlfriend. Two-handed tapping licks included.
This was a big learning time for me. I started recording music at home, first with one jam box, then with a two-jam box faux-stereo method that Danny hipped me to, then with a Tascam cassette four-track that Danny sold me. I still lived with my parents, and my room was a small studio. I had my keyboard and two guitars, and I also used my brother's bass a lot and eventually sort of inherited it, since Brian didn't stick with the music after high school. It wasn't from a lack of ability - Brian was a fine bassist and could have gone much further had he wanted to. He just was called by other things.
This was the first point at which I noticed I was often blocked in my writing. When I started composing music, I was prolific. The standards were low, but the output was high, even if I never did much with it. Now I was playing for keeps, and everything, I don't know, kinda changed. I put a lot of pressure on myself to write and record, and it was counterproductive - I'd end up just saying hell with it and doing something else rather than keep fighting my own perceived failure, not really knowing in my bones that that's how music is made. The entire writing and recording process could accurately be described as you fail and fail and fail until one time you manage not to so much.
So the Scene/Mirror Image ran its course, and I went bandless for a little bit, and then I put an ad up in a music store looking for a band to play with, and I got a response from a southside OKC band called Changes, a five-piece cover band with a female lead singer. They needed a keyboard player, and I got the job, and played with the band for a couple of years. Changes was further along in the local scene that the Scene was - they were a little older, they had more of their own equipment, they had more gig connections. The repertoires of the two bands were similar except that Changes obviously covered a lot of songs by female vocalists: Pat Benatar, Scandal, Fleetwood Mac, Heart. Our singer, Kim, could handle all of it and more; really good singer. My favorite thing Changes did was a medley of songs from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" - great, great music, often the grand finale of a Changes show, and the band played it really well and with palpable energy. The bassist and drummer, two brothers named Rodd and Rick, were and are like me huge Rush fans, another point in their favor, and we remain friends to this day. Good guys.
Eventually Changes' lead singer departed, and we recruited a replacement, Sherri. We didn't stay together much longer after that - nothing to do with Sherri - but her entry into the band ended up bringing about a profound change in my musical life, to be covered in Part 4...
***
In the fall of 1988, I was at the apartment of a guy named Tom who I was in music theory class with in high school. (I need to write about that class sometime, but not now. A world-famous musician was in the class, but it was neither Tom nor me, nor is this musician's fame in pop and rock. And the band Slayer played a central role in the story.) I was dicking around on his Casio keyboard - dicking well, I might add; I always had a knack for dicking around, understand - and Tom, a drummer, mentioned that he was playing with a pop and rock cover band called the Scene who were looking for a keyboardist. A couple of weeks later I was in the band. Fortunately someone else there had a keyboard, because I didn't yet own one. Tom ended up getting fired by the band a few weeks after I joined, but I stayed with them for a couple of years. The bassist, lead singer and de facto band leader was a buff guy named Danny, a year older than me. Very talented musician, played multiple instruments well and had a strong voice...I also played rhythm guitar and some lead in the band. The band had three or four guys who played multiple instruments, and we did the instrument-switching trick a lot, probably enough to cross over the silliness line but hey, we were young. And as was true in most bands I've been in, I was the youngest.
We did a nice mix of late 80s radio pop and rock, I think - well balanced between the rockier side and the poppier side. From the keyboard perspective, I actually liked the poppier side better, even when I wasn't crazy about the material. (I could live without hearing "Wild, Wild West" again.) I remember we worked up Depeche Mode's "Behind the Wheel" - a stretch for us, but what a great song and one where I was the musical pilot, controlling the underlying rhythm loop and playing the keyboard parts...I got my first keyboard in 1989, from a classified ad. It was a Roland D-20, the workstation version of the better-known D-50. Got it cheap from a guy in Shawnee who had to get rid of it. I would end up playing probably, jeez, seven or eight hundred gigs with that thing.
The Scene was the band with which I played my first bar gig. Four hours, didn't make jack, but breakfast at Denny's or wherever it was afterward was mighty tasty. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was played. We gigged maybe, I don't know, an average of once or twice a month while I was in the band. The talent was there for a much higher ascent in the local scene, no doubt in my mind, we had a lot of skills in the fold. Maybe it was just that we were all so young, 18-22. We couldn't play some places because some of us weren't 21...the band went through a few lineup changes and a name change, to Mirror Image. We went more classic rock for a while. We did a few originals - Danny was a prolific writer, I had a couple, the drummer Trace wrote as well - but we never got to the point where we were focusing on that. Though we did record a four-song original demo, which was my first experience in a recording studio. I enjoyed it; I was particularly happy with a sweet sub-Steve Lukather melodic guitar solo I contributed to a power ballad-ish song of Danny's about his then-girlfriend. Two-handed tapping licks included.
This was a big learning time for me. I started recording music at home, first with one jam box, then with a two-jam box faux-stereo method that Danny hipped me to, then with a Tascam cassette four-track that Danny sold me. I still lived with my parents, and my room was a small studio. I had my keyboard and two guitars, and I also used my brother's bass a lot and eventually sort of inherited it, since Brian didn't stick with the music after high school. It wasn't from a lack of ability - Brian was a fine bassist and could have gone much further had he wanted to. He just was called by other things.
This was the first point at which I noticed I was often blocked in my writing. When I started composing music, I was prolific. The standards were low, but the output was high, even if I never did much with it. Now I was playing for keeps, and everything, I don't know, kinda changed. I put a lot of pressure on myself to write and record, and it was counterproductive - I'd end up just saying hell with it and doing something else rather than keep fighting my own perceived failure, not really knowing in my bones that that's how music is made. The entire writing and recording process could accurately be described as you fail and fail and fail until one time you manage not to so much.
So the Scene/Mirror Image ran its course, and I went bandless for a little bit, and then I put an ad up in a music store looking for a band to play with, and I got a response from a southside OKC band called Changes, a five-piece cover band with a female lead singer. They needed a keyboard player, and I got the job, and played with the band for a couple of years. Changes was further along in the local scene that the Scene was - they were a little older, they had more of their own equipment, they had more gig connections. The repertoires of the two bands were similar except that Changes obviously covered a lot of songs by female vocalists: Pat Benatar, Scandal, Fleetwood Mac, Heart. Our singer, Kim, could handle all of it and more; really good singer. My favorite thing Changes did was a medley of songs from Pink Floyd's "The Wall" - great, great music, often the grand finale of a Changes show, and the band played it really well and with palpable energy. The bassist and drummer, two brothers named Rodd and Rick, were and are like me huge Rush fans, another point in their favor, and we remain friends to this day. Good guys.
Eventually Changes' lead singer departed, and we recruited a replacement, Sherri. We didn't stay together much longer after that - nothing to do with Sherri - but her entry into the band ended up bringing about a profound change in my musical life, to be covered in Part 4...
My Musical Life - Part 2
1984/1985: My first embrace with popular music was top 40 radio, but as time went on, my tastes (and my brother's tastes) started moving toward heavier, more guitar-oriented music. I still liked much of the poppier stuff, but my horizons were expanding. We also aggressively started catching up on the musical past we'd missed out on. One memorable example for me was the Led Zeppelin song Kashmir - it took a few exposures to get how amazing the song is, but all at once I did, and that was IT - that was the song of songs. For at least three months, just about every day I'd get home from school, sit in front of the stereo, put the headphones on, put on my tape of Kashmir gotten off the radio, and turn the volume as loud as I could stand it, and maybe a little louder than that. I'd listen to the whole thing through, often two or three times.
So I had the thought, yeah, that would kick ass to learn to play guitar and play the classic rock, hard rock and metal I was growing to like more and more. And then something amazing and unexpected happened. My parents went out of town for a few days in January 1985, and Brian and I stayed with our uncle Wayne and cousin Mark in their apartment in Washington, D.C. I remember we watched the Super Bowl while there, the 49ers beating the Dolphins...Mark was (is) about ten years my senior and so much fun for us to hang out with, like a really cool devil-may-care older brother. So we were enjoying ourselves, and then when we got to the guest room...in the corner there was an acoustic guitar and an intro-to-guitar booklet. The guitar was Mark's - he'd tried to learn it some but said he hadn't ever gotten far. I spent most of the weekend working through the booklet and trying to pick out songs. (The first song I ever sort of learned: Bryan Adams's "Run to You", and in the wrong key at that.) I already knew about the notes and theory from piano, so I made a lot of progress in that weekend.
Mark drove us back to our house and I had the guitar with me - my parents weren't quite home yet, so he and Brian and I taped an impromptu jam using a small trampoline struck by a dust buster (Brian), the guitar played percussively on a lap (Mark), and me on piano. That was awesome, but the best part came after my parents were home and Mark was getting ready to leave. I went to give him the guitar back and he told me I could have it. Now THAT was a life-changer.
So I dove deeply into teaching myself to play guitar. I would have to wait until the following Christmas to get my first electric, which I was really hungry for by then. My favorite two bands about that time were Rush and Iron Maiden, two bands I still love today, though I liked all kinds of stuff. My guitar playing improved a lot in the first year with all the time I spent on it.
Teaching myself wasn't a problem, except that I did develop some less-than-ideal technical habits which later proved hard or impossible to correct, and it placed a ceiling on my technique that I've not really ever busted through. I've learned over the years to compensate well for what I don't do properly, and my chops are more than good enough for most musical situations, but authentic major-league shredding is largely beyond me.
***
1986 through mid-1988: The big musical event in my life in 1986 was undoubtedly Metallica's Master of Puppets album. As with Kashmir, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it the first time I heard the album (I'd never heard any thrash metal before that), but by the third listen it was my favorite album of all time to that point. I loved the speed, the percussive, unhinged tritone chord progressions, the anger and complexity and rhythmic precision. This was new and different and intense and I wanted to absorb all of it I could. I listened to Master of Puppets multiple times a day for months.
In June, the family moved from the D.C. suburbs to Oklahoma City (whoa!) My musical desire at this point was to play guitar in a hard rock/metal band, preferably an original one but I could do covers too. Brian was headed this direction, too, and he got a bass for his 14th birthday. We both started growing our hair long, which we couldn't do in Maryland because we'd returned to a religious school for the last two years we were there. Metalheads at last!
Eventually, by '87, we ended up in a garage band with a drummer friend of ours, Ryan. We started out playing hard rock/metal covers, Dio, Whitesnake, AC/DC, Motley Crue...we even worked up an Yngwie Malmsteen classical metal-style original instrumental, though pitched much lower technically, of course. We went through a thrash period, briefly (the other guys weren't the thrash fanatics I was, and we weren't really capable of good thrash anyway), and then took a left turn one stoned weekend by recording a 90-minute cassette of free-form improvisations. Those turned out as a kind of rock by turns noisy and unfocused and vaguely jazzy and surprisingly coherent in the good parts. By this point we'd developed a taste for some other kinds of music, mostly older music, stuff like Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, the Doors. I was also getting heavily into hypertechnical fusion jazz guitarists like Allan Holdsworth and Al DiMeola.
We never had two things that would seem essential to a band - we never had a name, and we never had a lead singer. None of us could really do it while playing, and we auditioned a few singers, but no one fit. We never played live except for a few songs at a couple of parties. We were scattershot about practicing, anyway, and sometimes we had trouble because we couldn't find a place to play where the cops wouldn't be called on us for excessive noise. We did some more improvisational recordings, and I did write a long, complex multi-part piece called Emerald Ocean that we spent maybe a couple of months working up. Three high school kids trying to sound like Yes or Rush and not totally screwing it up, well, that's a victory all three of us can feel good about. We all grew a lot as players during our time together, and we were pretty good friends most of the time too, and I look back fondly on our jamming. I wish I still had a recording of us playing Emerald Ocean, and I'd love to record a version of it on my own now. Might be a 25th anniversary version.
So I had the thought, yeah, that would kick ass to learn to play guitar and play the classic rock, hard rock and metal I was growing to like more and more. And then something amazing and unexpected happened. My parents went out of town for a few days in January 1985, and Brian and I stayed with our uncle Wayne and cousin Mark in their apartment in Washington, D.C. I remember we watched the Super Bowl while there, the 49ers beating the Dolphins...Mark was (is) about ten years my senior and so much fun for us to hang out with, like a really cool devil-may-care older brother. So we were enjoying ourselves, and then when we got to the guest room...in the corner there was an acoustic guitar and an intro-to-guitar booklet. The guitar was Mark's - he'd tried to learn it some but said he hadn't ever gotten far. I spent most of the weekend working through the booklet and trying to pick out songs. (The first song I ever sort of learned: Bryan Adams's "Run to You", and in the wrong key at that.) I already knew about the notes and theory from piano, so I made a lot of progress in that weekend.
Mark drove us back to our house and I had the guitar with me - my parents weren't quite home yet, so he and Brian and I taped an impromptu jam using a small trampoline struck by a dust buster (Brian), the guitar played percussively on a lap (Mark), and me on piano. That was awesome, but the best part came after my parents were home and Mark was getting ready to leave. I went to give him the guitar back and he told me I could have it. Now THAT was a life-changer.
So I dove deeply into teaching myself to play guitar. I would have to wait until the following Christmas to get my first electric, which I was really hungry for by then. My favorite two bands about that time were Rush and Iron Maiden, two bands I still love today, though I liked all kinds of stuff. My guitar playing improved a lot in the first year with all the time I spent on it.
Teaching myself wasn't a problem, except that I did develop some less-than-ideal technical habits which later proved hard or impossible to correct, and it placed a ceiling on my technique that I've not really ever busted through. I've learned over the years to compensate well for what I don't do properly, and my chops are more than good enough for most musical situations, but authentic major-league shredding is largely beyond me.
***
1986 through mid-1988: The big musical event in my life in 1986 was undoubtedly Metallica's Master of Puppets album. As with Kashmir, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it the first time I heard the album (I'd never heard any thrash metal before that), but by the third listen it was my favorite album of all time to that point. I loved the speed, the percussive, unhinged tritone chord progressions, the anger and complexity and rhythmic precision. This was new and different and intense and I wanted to absorb all of it I could. I listened to Master of Puppets multiple times a day for months.
In June, the family moved from the D.C. suburbs to Oklahoma City (whoa!) My musical desire at this point was to play guitar in a hard rock/metal band, preferably an original one but I could do covers too. Brian was headed this direction, too, and he got a bass for his 14th birthday. We both started growing our hair long, which we couldn't do in Maryland because we'd returned to a religious school for the last two years we were there. Metalheads at last!
Eventually, by '87, we ended up in a garage band with a drummer friend of ours, Ryan. We started out playing hard rock/metal covers, Dio, Whitesnake, AC/DC, Motley Crue...we even worked up an Yngwie Malmsteen classical metal-style original instrumental, though pitched much lower technically, of course. We went through a thrash period, briefly (the other guys weren't the thrash fanatics I was, and we weren't really capable of good thrash anyway), and then took a left turn one stoned weekend by recording a 90-minute cassette of free-form improvisations. Those turned out as a kind of rock by turns noisy and unfocused and vaguely jazzy and surprisingly coherent in the good parts. By this point we'd developed a taste for some other kinds of music, mostly older music, stuff like Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, the Doors. I was also getting heavily into hypertechnical fusion jazz guitarists like Allan Holdsworth and Al DiMeola.
We never had two things that would seem essential to a band - we never had a name, and we never had a lead singer. None of us could really do it while playing, and we auditioned a few singers, but no one fit. We never played live except for a few songs at a couple of parties. We were scattershot about practicing, anyway, and sometimes we had trouble because we couldn't find a place to play where the cops wouldn't be called on us for excessive noise. We did some more improvisational recordings, and I did write a long, complex multi-part piece called Emerald Ocean that we spent maybe a couple of months working up. Three high school kids trying to sound like Yes or Rush and not totally screwing it up, well, that's a victory all three of us can feel good about. We all grew a lot as players during our time together, and we were pretty good friends most of the time too, and I look back fondly on our jamming. I wish I still had a recording of us playing Emerald Ocean, and I'd love to record a version of it on my own now. Might be a 25th anniversary version.
My Musical Life - Part 1
This will be a series of entries relating much of my life as a musician, composer and listener, presented in roughly chronological order. Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I expect I'll enjoy writing it.
***
Where I come from: Music often runs in families, and mine's no exception. My father is an accomplished pianist and a true natural musician. He played keyboards (electric piano and organ, back then; he wasn't a synth jockey) in rock and R & B cover bands in the D.C. area in the early 70s. There's a picture of me at age 2 plunking around on a black Wurlitzer electric piano in our apartment. I grew up hearing my father play - he played piano in church sometimes, and he'd often play at home just after dinner. He was and is a pleasure to listen to, melodic and soulful, with a fine singing voice as well. My mother also plays piano - she majored in music for a year at college. It's been many a year since I've heard her play now, but when I was growing up she would play now and then - often Bach's Invention No. 5, which she'd learned in college, I think. Both my parents have sung in church choirs for a long time also...my three younger siblings are also musical, but we'll get to them later.
1974 (I was born in March 1970): The first time I remember playing an instrument. I think I was in some sort of kids' program at a community college and got to play on a piano there a little.
1976: Started piano lessons. I would take them for six years, with a few different teachers. My teachers were good (and patient, as any good teacher has to be), and taught me about technique, expression and theory. The technique was always the most frustrating - I didn't enjoy practicing, though I'm glad my parents made me stick with it. The theory, on the other hand, I was comfortable with. I didn't really understand a lot of the classical music I was assigned, except when my teachers played it well for me - when I played it, the music didn't feel that way and I had difficulty connecting with and appreciating what I was playing. Maybe because I was focused on it as a difficult chore. But when I'd just mess around on the piano and make up music - often in vague or unaware imitation of some pop/rockish thing I'd heard on TV - then I was on board; then music was fun.
1982/83: My parents finally gave in and let me quit piano lessons, which I was sick of. I didn't want anything to do with music at the time. I even made it a point not to take music appreciation as an elective in 7th grade. (Very bad call - I took industrial arts and failed it.) But in an ironic development, toward the end of that year, I started listening to top 40 and rock radio. Obsessively. You have to understand something: unlike most kids, I listened to virtually no popular music before age 12, except what I heard incidentally. This was for religious reasons: back then my folks were...well, not fundamentalists, but closer to that description than they would be later. We spent a lot of time at church, and for much of that period my two-years-younger brother Brian and I went to a Baptist school. My parents listened to current popular music when I was little but pretty much stopped when they converted, or maybe a little after. The devil's music just wasn't around unless my brother and I thought to go out of our way to hear it.
So what changed? One night during the last week of 1982, I was watching TV, alone, and the Solid Gold show was on, and they were doing a two-hour special, a year-end countdown of the 40 biggest songs of the year. A few artists, maybe ten of them, performed their hits (lip-synced, though I didn't know it then); for the remaining songs, the show's dancers did a routine to maybe 30 seconds of the song. I'd heard only a few of the songs before, and only snippets then, not knowing who did them or what the name of the song was. So I was introduced to all of these songs, all these sounds and styles and textures and expressions, all at once. An alien landing on a lush blue and green planet.
This show changed my life. To this day, hearing almost any song featured on that show causes some endorphin release to go off in my brain. I started listening to the radio the next day and every day after - often late at night, with headphones, undetected and undisturbed, discovering the music. When we got home from church on Sundays, I'd rush downstairs to the stereo to catch the last hour of the Casey Kasem countdown. My little brother was getting the bug too - both of us started taping lots of songs off the radio about then, using leftover cassettes our dad had in storage that originally contained meeting minutes or something. Not with a stereo cassette deck, which we didn't have, but rather with one of those little portable tape recorders placed close to a speaker.
I returned to the piano with a vengeance, because now I had to figure out how to play the music I heard and liked. And while I was there, I would often segue into making up riffs and lines that sounded like the music on the radio. Wasn't long before I was writing lyrics during math class and composing whole pieces of music. I didn't love playing piano before, but now I did. Now I could imagine *being* one of those folks I heard on the radio. I'd think about music all the time, and I needed to: life as a young teenager was often confusing, embarrassing and hurtful. Music was more than just entertainment; it was a desperately needed refuge.
Our parents didn't exactly like this new development, and they sort of tried to forbid the music a couple of times - but I'm sure they knew it was a losing battle, and I don't suspect their hearts were in it anyway. I'm sure they saw how much joy the music brought us.
***
Where I come from: Music often runs in families, and mine's no exception. My father is an accomplished pianist and a true natural musician. He played keyboards (electric piano and organ, back then; he wasn't a synth jockey) in rock and R & B cover bands in the D.C. area in the early 70s. There's a picture of me at age 2 plunking around on a black Wurlitzer electric piano in our apartment. I grew up hearing my father play - he played piano in church sometimes, and he'd often play at home just after dinner. He was and is a pleasure to listen to, melodic and soulful, with a fine singing voice as well. My mother also plays piano - she majored in music for a year at college. It's been many a year since I've heard her play now, but when I was growing up she would play now and then - often Bach's Invention No. 5, which she'd learned in college, I think. Both my parents have sung in church choirs for a long time also...my three younger siblings are also musical, but we'll get to them later.
1974 (I was born in March 1970): The first time I remember playing an instrument. I think I was in some sort of kids' program at a community college and got to play on a piano there a little.
1976: Started piano lessons. I would take them for six years, with a few different teachers. My teachers were good (and patient, as any good teacher has to be), and taught me about technique, expression and theory. The technique was always the most frustrating - I didn't enjoy practicing, though I'm glad my parents made me stick with it. The theory, on the other hand, I was comfortable with. I didn't really understand a lot of the classical music I was assigned, except when my teachers played it well for me - when I played it, the music didn't feel that way and I had difficulty connecting with and appreciating what I was playing. Maybe because I was focused on it as a difficult chore. But when I'd just mess around on the piano and make up music - often in vague or unaware imitation of some pop/rockish thing I'd heard on TV - then I was on board; then music was fun.
1982/83: My parents finally gave in and let me quit piano lessons, which I was sick of. I didn't want anything to do with music at the time. I even made it a point not to take music appreciation as an elective in 7th grade. (Very bad call - I took industrial arts and failed it.) But in an ironic development, toward the end of that year, I started listening to top 40 and rock radio. Obsessively. You have to understand something: unlike most kids, I listened to virtually no popular music before age 12, except what I heard incidentally. This was for religious reasons: back then my folks were...well, not fundamentalists, but closer to that description than they would be later. We spent a lot of time at church, and for much of that period my two-years-younger brother Brian and I went to a Baptist school. My parents listened to current popular music when I was little but pretty much stopped when they converted, or maybe a little after. The devil's music just wasn't around unless my brother and I thought to go out of our way to hear it.
So what changed? One night during the last week of 1982, I was watching TV, alone, and the Solid Gold show was on, and they were doing a two-hour special, a year-end countdown of the 40 biggest songs of the year. A few artists, maybe ten of them, performed their hits (lip-synced, though I didn't know it then); for the remaining songs, the show's dancers did a routine to maybe 30 seconds of the song. I'd heard only a few of the songs before, and only snippets then, not knowing who did them or what the name of the song was. So I was introduced to all of these songs, all these sounds and styles and textures and expressions, all at once. An alien landing on a lush blue and green planet.
This show changed my life. To this day, hearing almost any song featured on that show causes some endorphin release to go off in my brain. I started listening to the radio the next day and every day after - often late at night, with headphones, undetected and undisturbed, discovering the music. When we got home from church on Sundays, I'd rush downstairs to the stereo to catch the last hour of the Casey Kasem countdown. My little brother was getting the bug too - both of us started taping lots of songs off the radio about then, using leftover cassettes our dad had in storage that originally contained meeting minutes or something. Not with a stereo cassette deck, which we didn't have, but rather with one of those little portable tape recorders placed close to a speaker.
I returned to the piano with a vengeance, because now I had to figure out how to play the music I heard and liked. And while I was there, I would often segue into making up riffs and lines that sounded like the music on the radio. Wasn't long before I was writing lyrics during math class and composing whole pieces of music. I didn't love playing piano before, but now I did. Now I could imagine *being* one of those folks I heard on the radio. I'd think about music all the time, and I needed to: life as a young teenager was often confusing, embarrassing and hurtful. Music was more than just entertainment; it was a desperately needed refuge.
Our parents didn't exactly like this new development, and they sort of tried to forbid the music a couple of times - but I'm sure they knew it was a losing battle, and I don't suspect their hearts were in it anyway. I'm sure they saw how much joy the music brought us.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Relearning how to shoot a basketball
As I mentioned before, I've been shooting baskets in the early morning a lot lately. Good way to start the day. The twist here is that I'm taking virtually all my shots left-handed, something I've never done before. This is part of an overall quest to strengthen my left hand, wrist and arm to help with drumming.
What I noticed right away is that I didn't know *how* to shoot lefty. Shooting a basketball requires a number of different muscle movements to all be coordinated with each other. You plant your feet and step a certain way into the shooting motion, you turn your body to a given angle, you raise and extend your shooting arm from your body for a certain amount of time, you use your non-shooting hand to help steady the ball for part of the motion, the wrist and fingers move in certain ways as you take the shot. Right-handed, I do all this without thinking - I don't do it particularly well, but that's a matter of finer adjustments and endless practice. The basic motion of shooting is automatic. From the left side, not so at all - my movements were way, way out of sync.
Most of the above applies to throwing a baseball, a football or anything else. We've all heard the phrase "throwing like a girl", though innate gender differences have nothing to do with it - female athletes learn to throw the right way just as readily as males do. Men have more strength to put behind the throw, but even a very strong man wouldn't be able to throw well with the throw-like-a-girl motion. The boy/girl thing exists only because most boys tend to grow up throwing sports balls around and most girls don't. And once you learn how to throw, it's like riding a bike, you don't forget it or even have to think about it.
Back to my lefty shooting, I've improved my form a lot in just five or six sessions. It's still not anywhere near what my right-handed form is, but it's not completely clumsy as it was the first time out. The biggest difficulties are using the right amount of force when shooting from off to the side of the court and getting enough power behind long-range shots without totally losing my aim. Actually hit a couple of fadeaway jumpers today, which I was utterly hopeless on the first time. About 50,000 more years of practice and I'll be able to do that like Dirk Nowitzki. Maybe.
What I noticed right away is that I didn't know *how* to shoot lefty. Shooting a basketball requires a number of different muscle movements to all be coordinated with each other. You plant your feet and step a certain way into the shooting motion, you turn your body to a given angle, you raise and extend your shooting arm from your body for a certain amount of time, you use your non-shooting hand to help steady the ball for part of the motion, the wrist and fingers move in certain ways as you take the shot. Right-handed, I do all this without thinking - I don't do it particularly well, but that's a matter of finer adjustments and endless practice. The basic motion of shooting is automatic. From the left side, not so at all - my movements were way, way out of sync.
Most of the above applies to throwing a baseball, a football or anything else. We've all heard the phrase "throwing like a girl", though innate gender differences have nothing to do with it - female athletes learn to throw the right way just as readily as males do. Men have more strength to put behind the throw, but even a very strong man wouldn't be able to throw well with the throw-like-a-girl motion. The boy/girl thing exists only because most boys tend to grow up throwing sports balls around and most girls don't. And once you learn how to throw, it's like riding a bike, you don't forget it or even have to think about it.
Back to my lefty shooting, I've improved my form a lot in just five or six sessions. It's still not anywhere near what my right-handed form is, but it's not completely clumsy as it was the first time out. The biggest difficulties are using the right amount of force when shooting from off to the side of the court and getting enough power behind long-range shots without totally losing my aim. Actually hit a couple of fadeaway jumpers today, which I was utterly hopeless on the first time. About 50,000 more years of practice and I'll be able to do that like Dirk Nowitzki. Maybe.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Knowledge doesn't change behavior
Read this sentence recently. A couple of examples given were obese doctors and divorced marriage counselors...in my experience, the sentence is often true. Most people with dubious health habits or social skills or life strategies know they're not flying right. If they could wave a magic wand and fix those things, if it were that easy, they'd have done it already. Knowing is half the battle but that other half's a bitch.
Numbers that capture their subject perfectly
A baseball post this time. If you go to Eddie Murray's page on baseball-reference.com and check out the OPS+ column (*) from 1981 to 1984, you see this remarkable series of numbers: 156, 156, 156, 156. Yes, that's his story, that's exactly the hitter I rooted for as an Orioles fan growing up in Maryland, that's him, right there. So consistent it was eerie. Steady Eddie brought his same great game every day and every year. Murray ranked either 2nd or 3rd in the AL in OPS+ in all four of those seasons, and he won the Gold Glove at his position in three of them. Sustained excellence. He was an intensely private guy, not a rah-rah type at all, not a sports media favorite - Eddie led by example. Some mistook his quietness, thought he didn't care that much. I can't blame him for not answering, seeing as how he was kind of busy at the time putting the team on his back and carrying them in crucial games in August and September.
(*) - OPS+, for those who aren't familiar, is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, adjusted for the effects of the hitter's home park and compared to league average. It's a sound measure of a hitter's overall productivity. A hitter with a 100 OPS+ is dead average for his league. A hitter with a 156 OPS+ is kicking serious ass.
(*) - OPS+, for those who aren't familiar, is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, adjusted for the effects of the hitter's home park and compared to league average. It's a sound measure of a hitter's overall productivity. A hitter with a 100 OPS+ is dead average for his league. A hitter with a 156 OPS+ is kicking serious ass.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
basketball in the morning
I've been doing this lately sometimes, and I'm happy to find a form of exercise I enjoy. I'll go shoot baskets for 15-30 minutes. And to mix things up, I've been attempting the majority of my shots left-handed. I miss a lot, but so what - if I do it for a while, I'll get better, if that's even a concern. Morning is the perfect time, since it's not 137 degrees outside yet (that doesn't arrive until about 10 am around here in July) and the nearby court's empty. It's a meditation.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Tales from Topographic Oceans
I listened to Yes's 1974 Tales from Topographic Oceans album in its entirety today, something I've never done. While I've been a big Yes fan for 25 years, I've not bought or become familiar with all their albums, and this particular release I may have heard a few minutes of 20 years or so ago but that's it. Tales is, according to allmusic.com, the most controversial album in the band's catalog. Released a couple of years after their legendary trio of albums (The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge), Tales was a step even further out - Close to the Edge had only three songs, with the 20-minute title track filling one whole album side; Tales is a double album with four songs, each as long and perhaps even more complex and far-flung. The band wasn't getting along well by this point - drummer Bill Bruford had left before the recording of Tales, and keyboardist Rick Wakeman would leave after it. Singer Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe were beginning to dominate; they wrote pretty much the whole album this time around. The Wikipedia page for Tales from Topographic Oceans has more of the story...the album sold well, though not as well as their previous few, because Yes was very popular at the time already, but the critical reaction to Tales was nothing short of savage. Not that Yes were really critical darlings even before - what prog-rock band ever would be, especially back then - but look up some of the reviews. For many critics, Tales was everything that was wrong with its genre, what they heard as indulgent, excessive, meandering, pointless virtuosity. It was too much for a lot of fans as well, and the band's popularity started fading. The album was fairly hard to find by the time I started listening to the band in the late 80s - it may have been out of print then - and I'd not gotten around to hearing it until today.
So was Tales from Topographic Oceans the Heaven's Gate/Ishtar that critics and many fans said it was? The answer: No, not even close. It's a damn good album, as long as you take it on its own terms. Yes wasn't trying to make another Fragile. Tales is nearly devoid of anything you could call a pop hook - well, there's a catchy refrain here and there, but not for long. It's certainly not the first Yes album I'd recommend to a new listener. It's challenging as hell. Don't even try to figure out the lyrics. But a lot of it's flat-out gorgeous, especially the folky parts and multi-tracked vocals. The songs aren't 15 minutes of disjointed sixteenth-note riffs in 13/8 followed by four boring minutes of Mellotron strings, not at all - they breathe, they evolve and unfold, they take the listener unexpected places. Steve Howe has said that Tales has his best guitar work, and I agree. And there's so much of it over 81 minutes, and in so many styles.
Tales is unmistakably Yes, but it has a wider variety of sounds and styles and textures than any of their other albums. Does it all work? No - there are many stretches where you want to say, okay, let's move it along, fellas. It's bloated and overwritten, though true to the intent of the writers, which I would say is more important: Anderson and Howe weren't interested in a boiled-down, concise version of what they heard in their heads, and they stuck to their guns, and they damn well should have. I respect that a lot more than an artist just doing what's easy and safe. I can see why a lot of people didn't get into Tales, and it's not something I would listen to more than occasionally. Would really have to be in the mood for it. Though on the other hand, it would take ten full listens for me to even start to wrap my brain around this music properly.
So was Tales from Topographic Oceans the Heaven's Gate/Ishtar that critics and many fans said it was? The answer: No, not even close. It's a damn good album, as long as you take it on its own terms. Yes wasn't trying to make another Fragile. Tales is nearly devoid of anything you could call a pop hook - well, there's a catchy refrain here and there, but not for long. It's certainly not the first Yes album I'd recommend to a new listener. It's challenging as hell. Don't even try to figure out the lyrics. But a lot of it's flat-out gorgeous, especially the folky parts and multi-tracked vocals. The songs aren't 15 minutes of disjointed sixteenth-note riffs in 13/8 followed by four boring minutes of Mellotron strings, not at all - they breathe, they evolve and unfold, they take the listener unexpected places. Steve Howe has said that Tales has his best guitar work, and I agree. And there's so much of it over 81 minutes, and in so many styles.
Tales is unmistakably Yes, but it has a wider variety of sounds and styles and textures than any of their other albums. Does it all work? No - there are many stretches where you want to say, okay, let's move it along, fellas. It's bloated and overwritten, though true to the intent of the writers, which I would say is more important: Anderson and Howe weren't interested in a boiled-down, concise version of what they heard in their heads, and they stuck to their guns, and they damn well should have. I respect that a lot more than an artist just doing what's easy and safe. I can see why a lot of people didn't get into Tales, and it's not something I would listen to more than occasionally. Would really have to be in the mood for it. Though on the other hand, it would take ten full listens for me to even start to wrap my brain around this music properly.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
A Question I Get Occasionally
"Can you make money with that Scrabble stuff?" The answer: yes, but not very much. I've been playing tournaments since 2003, and I've won about $20,000. And we don't get any sponsorship money, so I have to pay all my entry fees and travel expenses myself - yes, including the trips I've taken to India, Thailand and Malaysia and the trip I will be taking to Poland this fall for this year's world championship tournament. I would guess I've broken even.
A typical multi-day weekend tournament might cost $75-$100 to play in the top division and pay $300-$500 to the winner and lesser amounts for second and third. There are a few tournaments each year that pay more, most notably the Nationals and the large opens. There, the first prize might be a few thousand - for the Nationals, it's $10,000 - but there's usually a big drop-off from first to the other prizes. For example, I narrowly lost my last game this year at the Dallas Open. I finished third, and won $700 - I'll gladly take it - but had I won that game, I'd have finished first and won $3,000.
What tends to happen is that there's a very few super-elite players, no more than five or ten in the world, who can reliably finish at the top in the bigger events, and a class of strong experts right below them, maybe another fifty or a hundred, who can finish up there now and then and come respectably close most of the time when they don't win. There's overlap between the two groups, and it's sometimes hard to say which group a player belongs to. Finishing near the top consistently as the players in the elite-but-not-super group do will keep your rating high, but if you finish fourth when they're only paying three or seventh when they're only paying six, no money for you. It's not unusual for players right below the super-elite to have one or two healthy paydays and follow it up with near misses in the next several events, given the streakiness and luck factor inherent in the game. I'm in that group as a player, and that's been my story sometimes. I've missed out by inches on nearly as much money as I've won. On the other end, a big tournament where almost everything goes right can yield a big score: Half my lifetime winnings came in one event - the 2006 Nationals, where I won $10,000 for finishing second. (Back then, the winner received $25,000, but Hasbro decided not to bother supporting adult tournament Scrabble anymore a few years ago, so now it's $10k to the winner.) With that fortunate happening, I've won somewhat more money per tournament game played than most other players who are as good as I am, as far as that can be guessed. The longer I play, the more that per-game figure will trend down unless I land another big fish, which requires large amounts of both luck and skill and is thus very difficult to do. Nationals in three weeks!
Not only that, you'd think that lower divisions of tournaments would pay much less, but they often don't. It's common to see someone winning a division consisting only of the twelve least skilled players in the room and winning as much or almost as much as the player who won the top division, having to face no one except the *most* skilled players in the room. The two achievements aren't remotely comparable - the winner of the bottom division of most tournaments would get slaughtered in the top division - but financially you wouldn't know it. So some players reach the top of, say, the division 2 range and stop striving. And I don't blame them: it's not the players' fault (assuming they aren't throwing games to get into lower divisions later; I'm sure that happens, but rarely), it's the system's fault. Why get your brains beat in in Div. 1 and win nothing when you can win 90% as much in Div. 2 as the Div. 1 winners at all but the biggest events? Why play Div. 2 and lose when you can play Div. 3 and win? And so on, down the line. Hi, we're tournament Scrabble. This here is our spokesman, Mickey Mouse.
It's not as bad as it could be, though, because the amounts of money aren't large enough to get really exercised about. We're all making peanuts. Scrabble pays less than almost any recognized competitive sport or game anywhere. Competitive eaters make, like, ten times what we do. I'm not complaining about it - I'd play Scrabble even without monetary rewards, because I enjoy the game and trying to get better at it and I've made a lot of friends in the game around the country and the world. If I cared about the money that much, I'd take up competitive eating...okay, no, I wouldn't, I think competitive eating is stupid and gross, but you get my point. I'd be happy to see more money in the game, but I don't expect it, because despite some woofing from various quarters, there's no real reason to expect it.
People have also asked me why there aren't more tournament players, given that so many people enjoy Scrabble and Words With Friends and other such games. I sort of know - just because someone likes playing Scrabble doesn't mean he or she wants to learn thousands of words and study strategy and tactics at length so as to be able to approach playing the game at its theoretical maximum against opponents trying to do the same. Even putting in enough effort to succeed in lower divisions is more than most people want to mess with. You'd think even so there would be more players than there are (about 3000 in North America). Surely there's some marketing whiz who could help us, but I don't see anyone like that among us now.
A typical multi-day weekend tournament might cost $75-$100 to play in the top division and pay $300-$500 to the winner and lesser amounts for second and third. There are a few tournaments each year that pay more, most notably the Nationals and the large opens. There, the first prize might be a few thousand - for the Nationals, it's $10,000 - but there's usually a big drop-off from first to the other prizes. For example, I narrowly lost my last game this year at the Dallas Open. I finished third, and won $700 - I'll gladly take it - but had I won that game, I'd have finished first and won $3,000.
What tends to happen is that there's a very few super-elite players, no more than five or ten in the world, who can reliably finish at the top in the bigger events, and a class of strong experts right below them, maybe another fifty or a hundred, who can finish up there now and then and come respectably close most of the time when they don't win. There's overlap between the two groups, and it's sometimes hard to say which group a player belongs to. Finishing near the top consistently as the players in the elite-but-not-super group do will keep your rating high, but if you finish fourth when they're only paying three or seventh when they're only paying six, no money for you. It's not unusual for players right below the super-elite to have one or two healthy paydays and follow it up with near misses in the next several events, given the streakiness and luck factor inherent in the game. I'm in that group as a player, and that's been my story sometimes. I've missed out by inches on nearly as much money as I've won. On the other end, a big tournament where almost everything goes right can yield a big score: Half my lifetime winnings came in one event - the 2006 Nationals, where I won $10,000 for finishing second. (Back then, the winner received $25,000, but Hasbro decided not to bother supporting adult tournament Scrabble anymore a few years ago, so now it's $10k to the winner.) With that fortunate happening, I've won somewhat more money per tournament game played than most other players who are as good as I am, as far as that can be guessed. The longer I play, the more that per-game figure will trend down unless I land another big fish, which requires large amounts of both luck and skill and is thus very difficult to do. Nationals in three weeks!
Not only that, you'd think that lower divisions of tournaments would pay much less, but they often don't. It's common to see someone winning a division consisting only of the twelve least skilled players in the room and winning as much or almost as much as the player who won the top division, having to face no one except the *most* skilled players in the room. The two achievements aren't remotely comparable - the winner of the bottom division of most tournaments would get slaughtered in the top division - but financially you wouldn't know it. So some players reach the top of, say, the division 2 range and stop striving. And I don't blame them: it's not the players' fault (assuming they aren't throwing games to get into lower divisions later; I'm sure that happens, but rarely), it's the system's fault. Why get your brains beat in in Div. 1 and win nothing when you can win 90% as much in Div. 2 as the Div. 1 winners at all but the biggest events? Why play Div. 2 and lose when you can play Div. 3 and win? And so on, down the line. Hi, we're tournament Scrabble. This here is our spokesman, Mickey Mouse.
It's not as bad as it could be, though, because the amounts of money aren't large enough to get really exercised about. We're all making peanuts. Scrabble pays less than almost any recognized competitive sport or game anywhere. Competitive eaters make, like, ten times what we do. I'm not complaining about it - I'd play Scrabble even without monetary rewards, because I enjoy the game and trying to get better at it and I've made a lot of friends in the game around the country and the world. If I cared about the money that much, I'd take up competitive eating...okay, no, I wouldn't, I think competitive eating is stupid and gross, but you get my point. I'd be happy to see more money in the game, but I don't expect it, because despite some woofing from various quarters, there's no real reason to expect it.
People have also asked me why there aren't more tournament players, given that so many people enjoy Scrabble and Words With Friends and other such games. I sort of know - just because someone likes playing Scrabble doesn't mean he or she wants to learn thousands of words and study strategy and tactics at length so as to be able to approach playing the game at its theoretical maximum against opponents trying to do the same. Even putting in enough effort to succeed in lower divisions is more than most people want to mess with. You'd think even so there would be more players than there are (about 3000 in North America). Surely there's some marketing whiz who could help us, but I don't see anyone like that among us now.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Four Dudes
Today, the tale of four dudes. Let's meet 'em:
First, we have Al. Al, like the others here, is a single fellow in a medium-priced U.S. city like the one I live in. This year, his income is $10,000. Yeah, ouch. At this income level, Al cannot meet even his basic needs on his own. He's either got to get significant outside help, from family, from friends, from the state, somewhere, or we'll soon find him in August three weeks unbathed, with a tan many high school girls would kill for, standing on the side of the interstate with a sign saying Anything Helps, God Bless. Al's main worry right now is just getting through the day. He doesn't have a steady job, obviously, and the longer he goes without one, the harder it will be for him to get one, and he knows it. Al, whether he's getting help or not, is almost surely a very unhappy fellow - there's a good chance he's clinically depressed and is at risk for developing any number of other coping deficiencies.
Next, we have Bob. Bob's income this year is $20,000. We wouldn't say Bob has it easy, but he's sure got it easier than Al. The difference between $10k and $20k is transformative: Bob has food, clothing, shelter, air conditioning, transportation. Bob's employed, though his job probably offers little fulfillment or advancement potential. He can get by, but man, it's not easy. Any false move or stroke of bad luck and he could be in serious trouble. He's either got crappy or, more likely, no health insurance. Bob knows about decisions like "if I buy this pizza tonight, I might have to donate plasma on Tuesday so I can pay the electric bill on Thursday before they cut my electricity off". Bob's pocketbook feels every mistake and bad break, even the little peccadilloes. But for now he's got a place, though it's small and the neighborhood's not the safest, and electricity and a beater car and a cheap TV and computer and some thrift store books and a futon and a well-worn guitar and some friends. It's not so bad. Bob has to spend nearly all his income on necessities, so unless he's extremely frugal he won't be able to save even a little for the future. Bob's treading water and who knows how long he can hold out, there's reason to fear in the small hours of the night, but it beats hell out of drowning like poor Al.
And then we have Chris. Chris's income this year, you guessed it, $30,000. While it's nowhere near the chasm that we saw between Al and Bob, the extra $10k Chris makes goes a seriously long way. He has a car, not a new one but a reliable import with 120k miles on it, and if you maintain those they run for years. He has health insurance. He has no trouble paying his monthly bills. He has a smart phone and some furniture and a few other nice things beyond Bob's reach. Chris can save some money, not a huge amount but enough to get the ball rolling if he's smart and watches his spending. It'll take some discipline for Chris to avoid living paycheck to paycheck, but it's very doable. Chris got a DUI earlier this year, for example: going to jail sucked and the $3,000 fine he definitely felt in the wallet, but it didn't break him. If Bob had done that, and Bob likes drinking just as much as Chris does when he has the means, he'd have been in dire financial trouble without a bailout. Chris can't quite buy a house yet, but he can rent a decent place in a decent part of town. He's not well off, but he's got all the basics without sweating them and he doesn't have to be close to perfect to stay safe financially. That's a lot of stress Bob has daily that Chris doesn't.
And finally there's Dave, who will have an income of $40,000 this year. Is $40,000 a lot of money, by American standards? Well, no. By the stats, Dave is lower middle to middle class. He can buy a modest house, or a new car, or a three-week European vacation. He can't buy more than one of these sensibly, but at least he has options. He also has the option to forgo those and save aggressively: Dave can sock away $10,000 this year and *still* have the life Chris does, which is hardly a beggar's life. Dave can think about planning his retirement - even if Dave isn't particularly good with money. Chris almost can but not unless he's excellent with his money, and for Al and Bob, even thinking about it hurts. The difference between $30k and $40k isn't near what the 10-20 or 20-30 differences are, but it's still one nice, fat cushion. When Dave buys beer, he doesn't have to think, oh yeah, I'd better save and buy that twelve of Natty Light. Dave drinks the good stuff.
To illustrate Dave's advantage more vividly, you remember when Bob was worrying about whether buying a pizza one night would make his life hard? Dave can buy a $17 large pizza every night of the year, wash it down with a $10 bottle of wine, spend $100 on cocaine every Saturday, lose $2,000 in Vegas on his annual vacation, and spend $150 on a call girl every first of the month, and he'll STILL have more money than Bob. This would be dumb, yes, but Dave could do it. If he's only half that stupid and blows just half those amounts on such things, he's still ahead of Chris even if Chris is a teetotaling ascetic who dines on Ramen noodles and water every night...but back to the real world. Assuming Dave and Chris are about equally sensible, Dave's extra 10k will help him sleep better at night, sure, but their lives aren't too different. Dave can go to Europe while Chris goes to Yellowstone; he can drive a 2007 car while Chris drives a 2003. He can have a bigger TV if he wants. He's 12% less likely to have a neighbor blasting his car stereo at 2 am. All of which adds up to...well, not diddly, but not a lot either. The only big deal is the ability to go hard on the retirement saving, I'd say.
(All dollar figures here are for single folks, remember. If you're thinking of families, 2x or 2.5x would be reasonable multipliers.)
***
I mention these fellows because I've been all of them, roughly speaking, and because it's been my observation that once people get much beyond the financial level Dave here has reached, they seem to forget what these guys go through and, more to the point, how money's ability to transform people's lives vanishes in a hurry as we move up the income scale. The notion of treating every dollar as equally sacred strikes me as ridiculous. Imagine the difference in poor Al's life if he suddenly woke up in Dave's bed (without Dave there). Going from $10k to $40k is profoundly life-changing - having had a similar experience myself, god, I can't even describe how good it feels. Better than all but the very best sex you've ever had. Going from $70k to $100k does far less to increase personal happiness, according to the studies I've seen, and going from $800,000 to $830,000, oh please, that's just numbers on paper unless you're greedy or perversely extravagant or overly competitive or you measure your human worth by how much money you have, none of which we should have any sympathy for. But it's a $30,000 difference all the same.
This all tells me that we should be doing whatever elevates as many people as we can into the working and lower-middle to middle classes, because that's where the largest potential gain in societal happiness is, by far. And the jobs that pay those salaries are jobs I believe most of the candidates could do, given opportunity and proper training. I've known people at all these lower income levels. Some are lazy or stupid, but most are not; they're more unlucky than anything, or if it's mistakes they've made, well...a good number of higher-income people are lazy and imprudent and drunkard too. Most of the benefit of increased income, as the examples above and my own experience illustrate, is not having to pay full price when you screw up. When $20k Bob screws up, it's a grievous matter and he's an immoral slacker we shouldn't enable - tough love, you know. When a federal judge making $200,000 gets a DUI blowing three times the legal limit, eh, he's just a good ol' boy, everyone goes a little far now and then, we're good forgiving folks, ain't we? It's a whole lot easier to look like a paragon of "personal responsibility" when you have a pile of money to insulate you from the consequences of your irresponsible decisions.
So if $20k Bob and $40k Dave are playing completely different games, and I'd say from firsthand experience that they are, then what of the gap between $40k Dave (doing darn okay, right?) and a hedge-fund manipulator who makes Dave's annual salary every 12 freakin' minutes? Totally off the grid. That presumably thoughtful people can look at this situation, the bizarre ratios involved, and conclude that disparities of that size have primarily to do with personal qualities...wow. Maybe the numbers involved are so large and imposing that people can't think about them: I remember from an old Bill James Baseball Abstract where he quoted a veteran scout as saying that people get all excited about a kid hitting 35 homers in AA, but if the kid hit 66 they wouldn't know how to think about it so they'd just find ways to discount it, not think about it. I'm quite sure the scout was right, and I think the way we look at today's widening income inequality is a lot like that. The change has come so rapidly and so extremely that we don't know how to think about it, so we don't.
First, we have Al. Al, like the others here, is a single fellow in a medium-priced U.S. city like the one I live in. This year, his income is $10,000. Yeah, ouch. At this income level, Al cannot meet even his basic needs on his own. He's either got to get significant outside help, from family, from friends, from the state, somewhere, or we'll soon find him in August three weeks unbathed, with a tan many high school girls would kill for, standing on the side of the interstate with a sign saying Anything Helps, God Bless. Al's main worry right now is just getting through the day. He doesn't have a steady job, obviously, and the longer he goes without one, the harder it will be for him to get one, and he knows it. Al, whether he's getting help or not, is almost surely a very unhappy fellow - there's a good chance he's clinically depressed and is at risk for developing any number of other coping deficiencies.
Next, we have Bob. Bob's income this year is $20,000. We wouldn't say Bob has it easy, but he's sure got it easier than Al. The difference between $10k and $20k is transformative: Bob has food, clothing, shelter, air conditioning, transportation. Bob's employed, though his job probably offers little fulfillment or advancement potential. He can get by, but man, it's not easy. Any false move or stroke of bad luck and he could be in serious trouble. He's either got crappy or, more likely, no health insurance. Bob knows about decisions like "if I buy this pizza tonight, I might have to donate plasma on Tuesday so I can pay the electric bill on Thursday before they cut my electricity off". Bob's pocketbook feels every mistake and bad break, even the little peccadilloes. But for now he's got a place, though it's small and the neighborhood's not the safest, and electricity and a beater car and a cheap TV and computer and some thrift store books and a futon and a well-worn guitar and some friends. It's not so bad. Bob has to spend nearly all his income on necessities, so unless he's extremely frugal he won't be able to save even a little for the future. Bob's treading water and who knows how long he can hold out, there's reason to fear in the small hours of the night, but it beats hell out of drowning like poor Al.
And then we have Chris. Chris's income this year, you guessed it, $30,000. While it's nowhere near the chasm that we saw between Al and Bob, the extra $10k Chris makes goes a seriously long way. He has a car, not a new one but a reliable import with 120k miles on it, and if you maintain those they run for years. He has health insurance. He has no trouble paying his monthly bills. He has a smart phone and some furniture and a few other nice things beyond Bob's reach. Chris can save some money, not a huge amount but enough to get the ball rolling if he's smart and watches his spending. It'll take some discipline for Chris to avoid living paycheck to paycheck, but it's very doable. Chris got a DUI earlier this year, for example: going to jail sucked and the $3,000 fine he definitely felt in the wallet, but it didn't break him. If Bob had done that, and Bob likes drinking just as much as Chris does when he has the means, he'd have been in dire financial trouble without a bailout. Chris can't quite buy a house yet, but he can rent a decent place in a decent part of town. He's not well off, but he's got all the basics without sweating them and he doesn't have to be close to perfect to stay safe financially. That's a lot of stress Bob has daily that Chris doesn't.
And finally there's Dave, who will have an income of $40,000 this year. Is $40,000 a lot of money, by American standards? Well, no. By the stats, Dave is lower middle to middle class. He can buy a modest house, or a new car, or a three-week European vacation. He can't buy more than one of these sensibly, but at least he has options. He also has the option to forgo those and save aggressively: Dave can sock away $10,000 this year and *still* have the life Chris does, which is hardly a beggar's life. Dave can think about planning his retirement - even if Dave isn't particularly good with money. Chris almost can but not unless he's excellent with his money, and for Al and Bob, even thinking about it hurts. The difference between $30k and $40k isn't near what the 10-20 or 20-30 differences are, but it's still one nice, fat cushion. When Dave buys beer, he doesn't have to think, oh yeah, I'd better save and buy that twelve of Natty Light. Dave drinks the good stuff.
To illustrate Dave's advantage more vividly, you remember when Bob was worrying about whether buying a pizza one night would make his life hard? Dave can buy a $17 large pizza every night of the year, wash it down with a $10 bottle of wine, spend $100 on cocaine every Saturday, lose $2,000 in Vegas on his annual vacation, and spend $150 on a call girl every first of the month, and he'll STILL have more money than Bob. This would be dumb, yes, but Dave could do it. If he's only half that stupid and blows just half those amounts on such things, he's still ahead of Chris even if Chris is a teetotaling ascetic who dines on Ramen noodles and water every night...but back to the real world. Assuming Dave and Chris are about equally sensible, Dave's extra 10k will help him sleep better at night, sure, but their lives aren't too different. Dave can go to Europe while Chris goes to Yellowstone; he can drive a 2007 car while Chris drives a 2003. He can have a bigger TV if he wants. He's 12% less likely to have a neighbor blasting his car stereo at 2 am. All of which adds up to...well, not diddly, but not a lot either. The only big deal is the ability to go hard on the retirement saving, I'd say.
(All dollar figures here are for single folks, remember. If you're thinking of families, 2x or 2.5x would be reasonable multipliers.)
***
I mention these fellows because I've been all of them, roughly speaking, and because it's been my observation that once people get much beyond the financial level Dave here has reached, they seem to forget what these guys go through and, more to the point, how money's ability to transform people's lives vanishes in a hurry as we move up the income scale. The notion of treating every dollar as equally sacred strikes me as ridiculous. Imagine the difference in poor Al's life if he suddenly woke up in Dave's bed (without Dave there). Going from $10k to $40k is profoundly life-changing - having had a similar experience myself, god, I can't even describe how good it feels. Better than all but the very best sex you've ever had. Going from $70k to $100k does far less to increase personal happiness, according to the studies I've seen, and going from $800,000 to $830,000, oh please, that's just numbers on paper unless you're greedy or perversely extravagant or overly competitive or you measure your human worth by how much money you have, none of which we should have any sympathy for. But it's a $30,000 difference all the same.
This all tells me that we should be doing whatever elevates as many people as we can into the working and lower-middle to middle classes, because that's where the largest potential gain in societal happiness is, by far. And the jobs that pay those salaries are jobs I believe most of the candidates could do, given opportunity and proper training. I've known people at all these lower income levels. Some are lazy or stupid, but most are not; they're more unlucky than anything, or if it's mistakes they've made, well...a good number of higher-income people are lazy and imprudent and drunkard too. Most of the benefit of increased income, as the examples above and my own experience illustrate, is not having to pay full price when you screw up. When $20k Bob screws up, it's a grievous matter and he's an immoral slacker we shouldn't enable - tough love, you know. When a federal judge making $200,000 gets a DUI blowing three times the legal limit, eh, he's just a good ol' boy, everyone goes a little far now and then, we're good forgiving folks, ain't we? It's a whole lot easier to look like a paragon of "personal responsibility" when you have a pile of money to insulate you from the consequences of your irresponsible decisions.
So if $20k Bob and $40k Dave are playing completely different games, and I'd say from firsthand experience that they are, then what of the gap between $40k Dave (doing darn okay, right?) and a hedge-fund manipulator who makes Dave's annual salary every 12 freakin' minutes? Totally off the grid. That presumably thoughtful people can look at this situation, the bizarre ratios involved, and conclude that disparities of that size have primarily to do with personal qualities...wow. Maybe the numbers involved are so large and imposing that people can't think about them: I remember from an old Bill James Baseball Abstract where he quoted a veteran scout as saying that people get all excited about a kid hitting 35 homers in AA, but if the kid hit 66 they wouldn't know how to think about it so they'd just find ways to discount it, not think about it. I'm quite sure the scout was right, and I think the way we look at today's widening income inequality is a lot like that. The change has come so rapidly and so extremely that we don't know how to think about it, so we don't.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
I made jambalaya
A few of you probably understand how improbable the subject line is, but for those who require more background...though I love to eat, I've never been a cook. Everyone else in my family does it well. In contrast, on a good day I can boil water and not totally screw it up. Maybe. Okay, that's an exaggeration, I can prepare a few basic meals to survive, but without an ounce of art. All I can do is go by the recipe, and I usually manage to mess that up somehow. Having me autograph your cutting board would make as much sense as having Charlie Sheen autograph your Bible.
It bothers me a little that I don't have cooking skills. I self-deprecatingly joke about it, but I think it's wrong of me to believe that I flat-out can't do something. That's a copout. I could learn to cook decently or even well if I wanted to. I would just have to practice a whole lot and get a lot of advice I could use well. It's just like anything else. My lack of natural talent just means it would take more practice, but that's ALL it means.
Oddly, I think growing up eating well, while I'd obviously never trade it, may have put me off on cooking for myself. I was very used to eating food cooked by either of my parents, both of whom are very skilled and experienced cooks. But whenever I've tried to cook before, it never turns out nearly that well, not even close. The flavors are wrong, the meats inconsistently cooked, the rice or pasta either hard or runny, the veggies limp and bland, the spices lacking or inharmonious. Even when what I make sort of tastes good, it always comes out looking seriously ugly, enough to throw off the experience of eating it just that little bit. I made cookies once, and they turned out sort of okay, but they had 50% too much chocolate and had funky flour deposits and were an unwieldy size and all stuck together or broke up too easily. Can I eat this stuff, yeah, but it's often a chore to finish what I make, and I grew up really enjoying most food I ate. As an adult, I've mostly gone around the problem by eating out all the time, and my taste buds have adjusted to it so now I crave all those multisyllabic chemicals engineered in labs to appeal to our vestigial evolutionary lusts for salt, sugar, and fat. You know, the stuff that probably kills many more lab rats than Food Inc. is ever going to admit to.
So you'll remember I talked a few days ago about how I'm now making an effort to do things I wouldn't normally do. Tonight's adventure: cook something seemingly out of my league, something more complex than I've tried before. I chose jambalaya, a dish my parents cook expertly. (As you might guess from my last name, my father's side of the family are Cajuns from Louisiana. We eat VERY well at family reunions, I assure you. Mmm.) Okay, so I looked at recipes on allrecipes.com and picked one with relatively few ingredients and instructions I might be able to follow. Went after work to get the ingredients, which took close to an hour in the crowded grocery store, and then went home and started right into preparing it. The site estimated an hour total prep and cook time - ended up being about 1:40, owing to my slowness at the prep. If I cut up veggies more than twice a year I'd be faster at it, but okay.
So omigod, how did it turn out? Uh...well, I'm glad I didn't cook it for anyone besides myself. Okay, here's the important afterschool special lesson I should take from this: have appropriate expectations. No, my dinner wasn't anywhere near good, at least by the standards of what I've come to know as jambalaya - but those are high standards, and it was my first time trying to make the dish. If I did it a hundred times, I'd figure it out at least decently. The rundown: the sausage was actually good, the rice and onions and tomatoes came out runny and uninspired, the shrimp was...rubbery and kind of off, I don't know, but I stopped eating them after about #5 and I hope I don't get sick. I'm guessing they didn't cook evenly or enough, though they looked pink and done and I cooked them as long as the recipe said. Not sure if I had the right heat setting on the stove, though. You got me...yes, I also could have asked my dad for a more tried and true recipe. I'm sure it would have been much better, but I did have it in mind that if the dish turned out really well I might pleasantly surprise family members with it. If I make the dish again, I'll do that.
So I spent a bunch of money and time on a meal bad enough that I wouldn't consider keeping the leftovers, and I'm queasy, and my kitchen is all messy now. Part of me - my stomach, presumably - feels like it was a total loss. But if I'm going to make a point of trying to do unfamiliar things, I have to accept that I'm not going to be great, good or even okay at everything I try. The trying, the getting past the fear of failure, is the point.
Despite what the Simon Cowells of the world would have us believe, we should feel no shame in being bad at something. Everyone is lousy at lots of things, and it's no big deal. In fact, everyone sucks at everything until they don't. How the hell do we ever learn anything except by failing as often as needed until we get it sussed? The only limit we have is time. If we had eternal life, every single person could eventually become absolutely great at everything, but our time here is short so we each decide for ourselves where we want to deploy our effort and go from there. And no one has any business telling us that our answer to that question is wrong.
It bothers me a little that I don't have cooking skills. I self-deprecatingly joke about it, but I think it's wrong of me to believe that I flat-out can't do something. That's a copout. I could learn to cook decently or even well if I wanted to. I would just have to practice a whole lot and get a lot of advice I could use well. It's just like anything else. My lack of natural talent just means it would take more practice, but that's ALL it means.
Oddly, I think growing up eating well, while I'd obviously never trade it, may have put me off on cooking for myself. I was very used to eating food cooked by either of my parents, both of whom are very skilled and experienced cooks. But whenever I've tried to cook before, it never turns out nearly that well, not even close. The flavors are wrong, the meats inconsistently cooked, the rice or pasta either hard or runny, the veggies limp and bland, the spices lacking or inharmonious. Even when what I make sort of tastes good, it always comes out looking seriously ugly, enough to throw off the experience of eating it just that little bit. I made cookies once, and they turned out sort of okay, but they had 50% too much chocolate and had funky flour deposits and were an unwieldy size and all stuck together or broke up too easily. Can I eat this stuff, yeah, but it's often a chore to finish what I make, and I grew up really enjoying most food I ate. As an adult, I've mostly gone around the problem by eating out all the time, and my taste buds have adjusted to it so now I crave all those multisyllabic chemicals engineered in labs to appeal to our vestigial evolutionary lusts for salt, sugar, and fat. You know, the stuff that probably kills many more lab rats than Food Inc. is ever going to admit to.
So you'll remember I talked a few days ago about how I'm now making an effort to do things I wouldn't normally do. Tonight's adventure: cook something seemingly out of my league, something more complex than I've tried before. I chose jambalaya, a dish my parents cook expertly. (As you might guess from my last name, my father's side of the family are Cajuns from Louisiana. We eat VERY well at family reunions, I assure you. Mmm.) Okay, so I looked at recipes on allrecipes.com and picked one with relatively few ingredients and instructions I might be able to follow. Went after work to get the ingredients, which took close to an hour in the crowded grocery store, and then went home and started right into preparing it. The site estimated an hour total prep and cook time - ended up being about 1:40, owing to my slowness at the prep. If I cut up veggies more than twice a year I'd be faster at it, but okay.
So omigod, how did it turn out? Uh...well, I'm glad I didn't cook it for anyone besides myself. Okay, here's the important afterschool special lesson I should take from this: have appropriate expectations. No, my dinner wasn't anywhere near good, at least by the standards of what I've come to know as jambalaya - but those are high standards, and it was my first time trying to make the dish. If I did it a hundred times, I'd figure it out at least decently. The rundown: the sausage was actually good, the rice and onions and tomatoes came out runny and uninspired, the shrimp was...rubbery and kind of off, I don't know, but I stopped eating them after about #5 and I hope I don't get sick. I'm guessing they didn't cook evenly or enough, though they looked pink and done and I cooked them as long as the recipe said. Not sure if I had the right heat setting on the stove, though. You got me...yes, I also could have asked my dad for a more tried and true recipe. I'm sure it would have been much better, but I did have it in mind that if the dish turned out really well I might pleasantly surprise family members with it. If I make the dish again, I'll do that.
So I spent a bunch of money and time on a meal bad enough that I wouldn't consider keeping the leftovers, and I'm queasy, and my kitchen is all messy now. Part of me - my stomach, presumably - feels like it was a total loss. But if I'm going to make a point of trying to do unfamiliar things, I have to accept that I'm not going to be great, good or even okay at everything I try. The trying, the getting past the fear of failure, is the point.
Despite what the Simon Cowells of the world would have us believe, we should feel no shame in being bad at something. Everyone is lousy at lots of things, and it's no big deal. In fact, everyone sucks at everything until they don't. How the hell do we ever learn anything except by failing as often as needed until we get it sussed? The only limit we have is time. If we had eternal life, every single person could eventually become absolutely great at everything, but our time here is short so we each decide for ourselves where we want to deploy our effort and go from there. And no one has any business telling us that our answer to that question is wrong.
The first rule of Scrabble Club is...no, you can talk about it. That joke is really old, btw.
The club is what I do on Monday nights, at a city rec center downtown. In addition to being a tournament player, over the last year and change I've been the director of the Austin Scrabble Club (where I've been going Monday nights since I moved to Austin and took the game up). Directing's cool; it took a bit to get used to but now it's comfortable. For that I thank, uh, everybody - the group here is about as easy to direct as you could want.
Our club website is austinscrabble.org - lots of info there. Probably could use some more pics and color, need to get around to adding that. Suggestions are most welcome.
We had 16 players last night, slightly below our usual turnout. I'd say 20 is normal - last week we had 26!
For the first time in forever, I wrote down my racks from two of the three games last night and analyzed the games when I got home. Less than a month from Nationals now, so why not take a snapshot. It's two games, so you can't tell much of anything from them, but I'd say I played to my established standard in the two games. My opponents were Kevin L. and Matt C., currently third and second respectively on the club ratings list. The win vs. Kevin I was pleased with, since I was able to come back from a 120-point early deficit. I kept the board open, kept taking points and hoping the right stuff would come, and at the end it did: with about 15 tiles left and both blanks still out, I got a blank and bingoed with NEOTERIC for 80, then drew the other for DAIDZEIN for 80 more to seal it (made the blank a Z - that's the only bingo in ADDEIIN plus a blank, it turns out.) Final was 439-348. The 398-376 loss to Matt was a cool game, lots of strategic twists and turns. I'll save the lengthy explanation and post it as an annotated game later, probably.
The third game I didn't write my racks down for, but that one had to be pulled out of the fire too. Won by 10 in the endgame. That brings my club record for the year to 38-13. That's about on pace - I've steadily won about 75% of the time in club for years. I'll likely win a bit less than 75% this year, though, because we've just started putting Quackle (a super-kick-butt Scrabble-playing computer program, for those who don't know) into the field when we're odd, and I'll be Quackle's most frequent opponent. I've played Quackle twice in club and gone 1-1; I play it a lot at home for practice and win maybe 40% of the time.
Our club website is austinscrabble.org - lots of info there. Probably could use some more pics and color, need to get around to adding that. Suggestions are most welcome.
We had 16 players last night, slightly below our usual turnout. I'd say 20 is normal - last week we had 26!
For the first time in forever, I wrote down my racks from two of the three games last night and analyzed the games when I got home. Less than a month from Nationals now, so why not take a snapshot. It's two games, so you can't tell much of anything from them, but I'd say I played to my established standard in the two games. My opponents were Kevin L. and Matt C., currently third and second respectively on the club ratings list. The win vs. Kevin I was pleased with, since I was able to come back from a 120-point early deficit. I kept the board open, kept taking points and hoping the right stuff would come, and at the end it did: with about 15 tiles left and both blanks still out, I got a blank and bingoed with NEOTERIC for 80, then drew the other for DAIDZEIN for 80 more to seal it (made the blank a Z - that's the only bingo in ADDEIIN plus a blank, it turns out.) Final was 439-348. The 398-376 loss to Matt was a cool game, lots of strategic twists and turns. I'll save the lengthy explanation and post it as an annotated game later, probably.
The third game I didn't write my racks down for, but that one had to be pulled out of the fire too. Won by 10 in the endgame. That brings my club record for the year to 38-13. That's about on pace - I've steadily won about 75% of the time in club for years. I'll likely win a bit less than 75% this year, though, because we've just started putting Quackle (a super-kick-butt Scrabble-playing computer program, for those who don't know) into the field when we're odd, and I'll be Quackle's most frequent opponent. I've played Quackle twice in club and gone 1-1; I play it a lot at home for practice and win maybe 40% of the time.
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