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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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