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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not exactly an “I hate hippies” rant, this song seethes with a rather venomous denunciation of the Sixties generation, who it seems to me squandered noble beginnings in a mass retreat to church and bank.
 
I get pretty specific here.  You can tell just how much of a skilled insulting bitch I really am, and why I was no fun at the family dinner table! 
 
“And then you got old
And then it was sold
Then it became the thing that holds you back
In your beautiful fucking sixties love
In your beautiful fucking sixties love
Your beautiful self loving minds
That keep everyone else far behind.”
 
This track has never been released anywhere before. 
 
How’s that for poetry made up on the spot, homes?  Yeah man I was beginning to feel skills in me I didn’t know I had.  My fascination with full improvisation had only just begun.
 
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