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 EPISODE 5: songs 092-100
NONPOETIC RAIN: LIVE ON KXLU (2001)
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out takes
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I think this recording of a live show at KXLU on a cold and rainy midnight in February is the darkest most frenzied Lucid Nation CD. It includes three freestyle improvisations (words and music), plus three loose cover songs, and two versions of earlier Lucid Nation tracks.
If Suburban Legends captured the sound of a rock band exploring its outer limits then Nonpoetic Rain is what happens when a group of near strangers skids out at the edge of total anarchy. Like the second side of Funhouse by The Stooges or parts of the White Light White Heat record by The Velvet Underground, order spills into chaos and back again in a pulse.
Los Angeles was suffering one of the worst storms in southern California history. We had to move our gear over mud, through sideways sheets of rain. Later a friend pointed out that Nonpoetic Rain rearranged spells Ronnie Pontiac, we chose that as the title, not just because it described the circumstances of the gig; it was also a secret nod to Ronnie since this performance took place on his birthday.
Bass player John Sellers was the moving force in getting together this short lived all male (except me!) line up, made up of the rhythm section of The Countdowns, who toured often opening for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and who backed infamous rhythm and blues legend Andre Williams on his Black Godfather CD.
Troy Taroy of notorious So Cal punk band The L.A. Times brought his magnificent guitar skills. All the way from the UK came saxophonist extraordinaire Liam Philpot, who was just tagging along for the ride when he found himself recruited into the band for the radio broadcast.
Troy Taroy played a Les Paul Black Beauty through a Supro champ. Ronnie Pontiac played Basketball Girl, a one of a kind Tele guitar made by GirlBrand Guitars of Tucson Arizona of wood salvaged from a demolished high school basketball court. Chris Larsen said in print it’s probably the best sounding guitar he ever made. Basketball Girl was plugged into a 1958 Fender Vibrolux tweed amp and a vintage Echoplex. John Sellers played a 1958 Fender Precision bass through an SWR WM50. Craig Waters played a 1976 Ludwig Vistalite drum kit.
Nonpoetic Rain: Lucid Nation Live on KXLU was released in a super limited edition of 100 home made copies. The few that made it into the hands of reviewers inspired comments that emboldened me to continue my freestyle experiments. Here’s my favorite review; it’s by Kurt Hernon of the late lamented BangsSheet, named after that most sacred of all rock critics, Lester Bangs:
"Does anyone out there remember Peter Laughner? He who loved rock and roll life so much that he exploded himself for it? He had this little band in Cleveland in the mid-70s when that town was at the bottom of the American urban shit heap called Rocket from the Tomb (not those wag the dog current neo-soul-cum-punk noisemakers Rocket from the Crypt; although a pretty cool plus for playing on the name). The Tombs also had this cat Crocus Behemoth in the band. Behemoth was actually David Thomas - who took the Tombs and warped them into Pere Ubu, who melted a queasy vision of the Velvet Underground into a noise war that begat one of the punk aesthetics finest moments. Laughner dissipated into the ether on a cloud of booze and dope. Ubu railed on.
“Lucid Nation takes Ubu’s "Heart of Darkness" into their bosom and suffocate it as it was intended to be. It’s on a little disc I got in the mail with a handwritten title of "Nonpoetic Rain" scribbled across it. Inside the jacket it explains the record as "Lucid Nation Live on KXLU". Fuck, I can hardly call it a record because the thing is really just this long, wild-eyed amphetamine howl at everything and everybody. Constantly building up, it breaks down the entire time. It is a strangely sexual (re: life filled) cacophony that undulates over and over again. The sleeve prattles on and on about Mingus, The Stooges, Patti Smith (all influences? Sanity?) like-minded folk. Friends. So they lock up in a radio studio and boil themselves into a trance. They record the whole thing, and if you’re lucky you’ll maybe hear a little of it someday. If not, you can take my word for it, they’re still out there. The freaks, the manic rock addicted wild-ones, the ones who don’t give a shit about the games to be played or the Wall Street blues. These are our people. We, theirs. Still." |
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An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 underage girls have been forced into prostitution in the United States, and that’s only counting the girls. Prostitution claims 90% of runaways, or throwaways as I call kids like myself who don’t run away, they get thrown out.
A sophisticated set up snares them. Pimps use attractive fellow minors as lures and managers (they only get juvi time). Drugs, beatings, gang rape, then tenderness and more drugs are the common formula whether you are in Atlanta or Istanbul. The number of girls suffering this fate worldwide has to be counted in the millions. And to think most people consider their nations civilized!
I was thinking about the runaways and the throwaways as we drove to this gig through the coldest, darkest, wettest storm Los Angeles had seen in decades. We were about to play a benefit for Children of the Night, once of the few organizations in the United States doing anything to help these kids. |
My favorite bass player of all time is Margaret Maldonado. She’s one of the most tortured Cancerians I’ve known and she has good reason to be, a whole list of good reasons and none of them are really her fault, more like an unjust society’s results.
Without Margaret’s help, and her truck, we never would have made it to this gig. Her suffering sometimes spilled over, creating ugly scenes and desperate moments during our friendship, but somehow Ronnie and I had the knack of making her laugh.
So here was the bass player I wanted in my band, the anchor of the band that months ago Danny Goldberg had almost signed, acting as roadie for an all male line up I didn’t even really want to be playing with. We found another way to get our gear home and she took off before we started playing.
I figured she’d listen to at least a little of the set. I knew we were going to do her song Coyote to close. I didn’t think she’d listen all the way to the end. So this short desperate song was for Margaret. In a way the entire set was my funeral for our lost band and a tribute to a friendship I could feel slipping away. |
A cover of the great Pere Ubu track was suggested by bassist John Sellers. I hadn’t been a Pere Ubu fan but I became one as soon as I heard this song. Rocket from the Tomb’s version from the early 1970s was our model.
It really described how I felt at the time. After all the heartbreaks Lucid Nation had so far brought me, here I was without even one other girl in my band.
I added more lyrics about runaways because the theme went so well with David Thomas’s great lines like:
“Maybe I’m a shadow on the wall,
maybe love is a tomb where you dance at night
maybe sanctuary is an electric light
and I’m so tired I feel like another man
and everything I see seems so underhanded.” |
Alright, I know I crow my own praises plenty, but slipping from Pere Ubu’s Heart of Darkness into AC/DC’s Night Prowler with a dash of Sonic Youth’s Pacific Coast Highway at the end, man, if you can’t see how bad ass I am, then fuck you anyway.
By this time Night Prowler PCH was no longer a catharsis, a healing cleansing for me, it was a powerful anthem, a song that I liked to start every rehearsal with because it made me feel strong.
As somebody who heard the words “get in the car” and was dragged into a car at the beginning of an abduction that was nearly murder, being able to sing those words with total comfort, with a sense of my own power, was an accomplishment.
This version strays into sarcasm, especially with Ronnie’s Cobain inspired goofy lead guitar deconstruction of the famous Angus Young solo. It seems to me to capture the overall experience of assault: the terror, the loss of control, the lulls, the moment of utter crisis, the shocky sleepy aftermath, even the absurdity. |
I returned to one of my favorite songwriters, John Fogerty, for this pessimistic though pre-9/11 prediction about the Bush presidency and the ascendancy of the American right wing.
I had seen riot grrrl, the Koo’s peace punk scene, and my band, evaporate right before my eyes. The stock market had crashed ending the go go Clinton good times. You could feel the bastards itching for war.
New inventions of war were ready to test. New strategies to keep America the vampire sucking the world’s resources to the bitter end were eager for implementation. New doctrines to fight the baby vampire nations we foster all across the globe awaited action.
With immigration laws pending that would institutionalize a slave population, the war against the middle class trumpeted on CNN daily, and the rich getting richer by gigantic gulps of wealth and power, to me this song sounds even timelier today than it did when I recorded it. |
Kerouac’s live recordings of him reading his own work became perhaps the most important influence on my work by the time the DNA and Suburban Legend CDs were recorded. Since then and even now Jack’s voice is my favorite thing to listen to before I write songs, and before I record.
In the song “GKM” from the DNA and Public Domain CDs I whispered about Jack talking to me from behind the moon. In this song of thanks to a teacher I never met, I used a haiku like minimalism similar to Jack’s “pomes” to conjure poignancy from a few facts and reflections about his life and about his influence on my art.
The dock that Kerouac was standing on giving me advice was not on any earthly ocean. Improvising lyrics is for me like dreaming. I like thinking that I got a visit from him as I stood at the edge of the unknown that is total improvisation, holding a handshake out to his ghost. |
The shocking thing is I remembered most of the lyrics even though I made no effort to! It’s always more fun when you can hear a hustler work his mark twice!
I think the wailing saxophone and chaotic rise and fall of the guitars on this version of Pimpin’ gives an even better background for the quintessential Hollywood (or New York or Baghdad) conversation. I like the way this version ends with a musical interlude of sad irony and my brief quip of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” |
This moody song about a lost friend is one of my favorite freestyle improvisations. The band was swept away into something special. My stream of consciousness lyrics clicked on this track, inspired by the guitarists who both gave wonderful performances out of thin air.
Since I knew Coyote was coming up next I returned to searching my feelings about Margaret and our lost band. Ronnie’s melancholic opening lick had been a favorite of our ex drummer Tia, but we never had a chance to make it into a song. It was the perfect starting place for a complete catharsis, a ritual purging of the sadness I felt about the end of my mostly girl band.
Am I singing about Margaret most of the time in this song, or myself? Both of us, I guess. I doubted she was listening anymore. I was singing about all the lonely coyotes out there, the runaways, the throwaways, the students in their claustrophobic rooms listening in the dark, the drivers on the freeway, all of us ultimately alone in the midnight storm.
KXLU is a Jesuit college. At the beginning of the song I can barely be heard saying into a toy megaphone: “please control your Jesuits.” |
One of Lucid Nation’s biggest hits from the popular DNA CD, even though I wrote the lyrics, I still considered this Grit’s song. I had expected it to be a very heavy emotional experience for me, but the previous song Déjà vu had released so much emotion, Coyote came out surprisingly light hearted.
I was still moving forward, I was still singing, I was here on the radio, singing to L.A. held hostage by a storm. All the misfortunes and heartbreaks of my life, I was still turning them into music, still letting them go. They could have wiped me out but they didn’t. Like the song says: “Hey you missed me.”
The end turns surprisingly sunny to close our set. A reminder that the clouds will part one day and sunshine always returns. “Whoa, little coyote, rock on coyote.” |
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