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 EPISODE 6: songs 101-142
TACOMA BALLET (2002)
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When Diane of Ruby Slipper zine interviewed me, she mentioned that her roomie liked Lucid Nation and would be willing to play a show with us in Seattle. Skeptical, I asked if this roomie had ever been in a band before. “Hole,” was Diane’s response.
Everybody was wondering where Patty Schemel had gone to and here she was. I asked if Patty would be interested in doing some recording instead. I invited Patty’s brother Larry to join in. In a dada inspired experiment, and as a gesture of thanks, non-musician Diane was asked to play keyboards.
The bass player originally set to do the recordings was Donna Dresch. Unfortunately, Donna was unable to make the sessions. Thanks to legendary New York Dolls sound man Nitebob, Greta Brinkman joined the experiment. Greta at the time was Moby’s live bass player. She had played with Blondie, L7, and Unseen Force. Kayla Tabb dropped by and played some percussion.
Jack Endino was set to do the recordings but when his schedule wouldn’t work he recommended Wes Weresch of Uptone in Tacoma, Washington, where we spent a week laying down over fifty tracks of total improvisation.
I came back with Ronnie at the end of summer for a few days of mixing. We finished on September 10, 2001. When we couldn’t fly home the next day, or for many days after, we holed up in a hotel room listening to all the tracks, marveling at many eerie presentiments of 9/11.
Back home, with the help of more experienced poets I realized that somehow, although completely unplanned, the new recordings had turned into the story of a girl discovering a terrible secret about her town, her lover, and herself. Like a big puzzle that comes into focus when all the pieces fit, the songs arranged in a certain order created a real story.
Why did I name it Tacoma Ballet? I loved to get coffee and a healthy snack at The Kickstand during breaks from recording. Upstairs the Tacoma Ballet practiced. Their dance steps thundered in the Kickstand back room.
I divided the record into two CDs of 16 songs each to represent two broken tower Tarot cards, the broken towers of the world trade center on 9/11. I named the discs after the final words of Gertrude Stein. The first disc was titled “What is the Answer?” The second was titled “What is the Question?” Why I did that will be explained as the episode continues.
Diane did the artwork for the CD. To me it looks like the heroine of Tacoma Ballet’s diary or a folder of her keepsakes.
We released the record with the help of McGathy radio promotions who worked it for about six weeks. Tacoma Ballet was #8 CMJ most added around July 4th 2002 and just peaked into the CMJ Top 200 at #195. Since it was a DIY release on our own tiny label we were proud, but we figured the fireworks were over.
We were getting great reviews. Magnet said: "a punk rock Exile on Main Street with shades of The Stooges, riot grrrl, Pere Ubu, and even The Doors." Rolling Stone wrote: "If Spivey sounds spacey, she's not. Her songs range from aggressive, screaming punk to beautifully melodic rhythm and blues, the very definition of garage-rock. Like Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill -- Lucid Nation has opened for both -- her band's music is raw, poetic, sloppy and infectious, and Tacoma Ballet is simply a bare-bones, kick-ass rock and roll record."
My favorite review was by Allen Ginsberg’s assistant for sixteen years Randy Roark (he worked for William Burroughs, too):
“Tamra begins at her most confrontational, singing of claustrophobia, of ties that bind, of being stuck in something old, of having reached the end of something. But by the time we get to the opening song of "What's the question?" it seems that Tamra has decided the answer is to "try something new before we die." And so the last songs seem to be about the scary pleasures of getting out, of finding release. By the final track (significantly entitled "Shelter") I felt like I had just heard rock's first novel.
“When Tamra opens her mouth, every song becomes a Lucid Nation song. And here, over a period exceeding two hours, Tamra uses language as a probe into the center of the human psyche, beginning with daily life inside the grind, which isn't pretty. After three years of experience improvising onstage, Tamra steps into the microphone at full speed, and then finds ways to make it go even faster. Sometimes to surprise herself she paints herself into a corner just for the pleasure of finding some way out.
“But to describe these CDs in literary terms is to do a disservice to the fact that Tacoma Ballet is above all a genre-hopping journey through country blues, Ramonesesque punk, dark psychedelia, electronic sound collage, with a very strong nod to the Rolling Stones, including a loopy deconstruction of "Happy" off Exile on Main Street, and, perhaps most of all, a blending of the aggressive, menacing bass sound of Peter Hook at the height of Joy Division and the band's general enthusiasm for all things Pere Ubu.”
I didn’t know Tacoma Ballet was slowly working its way up the charts at stations that chose their own play lists: hundreds of smaller colleges and commercial stations in what the business calls secondary markets. Fortunately, there was a chart to measure those stations, called the New Music Weekly Combined College Radio and Secondary Chart, the only chart for stations where DJs could still play what they wanted.
By fall we had broken top ten NMW. By November we were top five. And to finish off the year, after six months of steadily increasing college radio play, Tacoma Ballet hit #1 on the last chart of 2002.
Think about that: a musically and lyrically difficult, raw as hell record, released on a tiny DIY record label, with no steady radio promotion, had done the impossible. There we were above Beck and The Donnas at the top of the NMW chart. No one wrote about it. We didn’t have a publicist working the story so it was like it never happened; but it did happen, and it was a milestone for independent music.
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All Tacoma Ballet tracks are 100% improvised freestyle except infrequent backing vocals. In this song I threw down the dare, summoning inspiration from artists like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, exploring spontaneous creation in the belief that there are no mistakes if you pay close enough attention.
I’m singing to the band while the 2 inch 24 track tape was spinning: “What can this puppy do?” “Please do something wrong!” “There are no mistakes here. There are no mistakes!”
I was giving them the philosopher’s stone, the secret of the ages, the treasure Jimi Hendrix, Gertrude Stein, and Kerouac had taught me. But listen to the cowards! Do you hear any one of them freaking out into something inappropriate? No, they are committed to the groove. It pissed me off, but we made a good record together anyway. |
You can hear me telling the band I want punk rock and fast, but look what they gave me! Tacoma, and the Woody Guthrie Exhibition at the Tacoma Museum, had cast an Americana music spell I had to go with.
John Lennon said he didn’t feel he’d done his job unless his song was censored. This song has the distinction of being censored by liberals and conservatives alike! In Portland Maine the radio station received complaints from listeners who didn’t hear the sarcasm in my portrayal of America seducing and bullying. But the song was also censored by a few college stations in military towns.
This is one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet. As for the concept album storyline, Welcome to America sets the stage like in a movie when the camera out in space focuses first on America before zooming down to the city, and then the street where the story takes place. |
Another song to set the scene for the story, Big Dog is about America, yes, but it’s also about growing up a girl in a society where girls aren’t valued as highly as boys, where men are encouraged to throw around their weight.
This describes the atmosphere of the heroine’s country, town, and family. Might makes right, feed the strong and there won’t be any trouble.
The lyric was inspired by Shaquille O’Neal bitching constantly about needing the ball during the Lakers three-peat years. “You got to feed the big dog,” Shaq would mumble with a crooked smile. |
I see her walking through the tall grass of an empty lot deep in thought in her neighborhood, the nameless heroine of the story Tacoma Ballet.
This song surprised me by becoming one of the most popular on Tacoma Ballet. It’s so damn slow, but people love the atmosphere. One reason I think is the beautiful tone of the lead Ronnie plays in the background.
Thanks to the generosity of Guitar Maniac store owner Rick King, for the Tacoma Ballet sessions Ronnie used a 52 Telecaster (not a reissue!), a 1966 Gibson Flying V, and a 1958 Fender Jazzmaster (which Rick had earlier loaned to Unwound for their Leaves Turn Inside You sessions). On this track he’s playing the tele. |
I think of this song and of Punkophony from Suburban Legends as musical book ends.
Punkophony skewers punk elitists. Seven Stringer goes after the pretentious of a different sort: the boy’s club of professional metal and virtuoso guitarists.
As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, even rock and roll fails our heroine, because it’s just another kind of boy’s club. She’s even willing to play along. But they are disappointing anyway. What do you expect from re-enactors? |
In the story Tacoma Ballet, our heroine now recalls her ex-boyfriend. Not a macho pretender with a guitar, a poet of the real kind. She has not gotten over the heartbreak of their break up. Anyway soon enough she’ll discover he’s not what she thought anyway.
But I had no idea I was telling the larger story. To me this song was about playing with Patty Schemel who was almost drummer for Nirvana. Since there was an abandoned building next door where Nirvana had rocked the squat I was imagining that his ghost was hanging out to see what we were up to. So I sang him this song, though I never met him.
I wanted to add a third pun to the hello/how low theme of Tobi Vail’s Hamster Baby, later used to such great effect in Smells Like Teen Spirit. |
Depressed now, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet, surveys her life and her town in the season of the falling leaves.
And who tore down that last nest
to put up toxic boxes?
Idolizing the obnoxious
we curse ourselves for being cautious.
Some kind of primal dissatisfaction
rules our every action
Ronnie used a variety of rare pedals provided by Guitar Maniac including a very early guitar synthesizer, a late sixties Univibe, a Morley Echo Chorus, a Mu-tron 3, plus his own Tubeplex, the modern update of the Echoplex.
In his search for interesting sounds he tried unusual methods such as, in this song, playing guitar by whipping the strings with a broken rubber band. |
The heroine, feeling lost, goes home and we get to meet her family. When she shares at the table a moment of her terrible realization in a comment about rainbows, hoping for comfort, she gets a lecture from mom about ruining dinner instead. “If you were a good person you wouldn’t think those kinds of things…”
First I laid down the stream of consciousness track about a girl going home to her dysfunctional family for the holidays. Listening back the chorus became clear to me so I recorded it while we were mixing. It’s one of the more popular songs from Tacoma Ballet. |
The heroine decides what she needs is “a little bit less self control.” But the healthy instinct for rebellion finds no inspiration but beer commercials and the hot sex insinuations of advertising.
Sometimes you can find out things about yourself in the arms of a stranger. Sometimes alcohol can open doors you didn’t know you had. But sometimes it’s only a reprieve, and the next morning nothing has changed.
Where there’s a will there’s a way is a joke if you don’t know where you are going, and how many people do? |
This rocking little faux southern rock song is one of my favorite tracks on Tacoma Ballet.
The heroine of the story, with a hangover and a dirty feeling about what seemed exciting the night before, decides that if misery is her lot then she will learn to love misery, she will become a misery artist.
Diane had never played with a band before and had very little musical experience. I invited her to play after reading about dada and the value of inexperience in exploring the frontiers of art. Wes had analog synthesizers including a MemoryMoog, a Sequential Circuits Prophet V, an Optagon, and a Fender Rhodes.
I think the experiment was a great success. With her refined sense of design and deep knowledge of art and avant-garde rock history, Diane’s performance is a highlight and was much praised by reviewers. |
Embracing misery turns out not to be so much fun.
Embracing the darkness you feel doesn’t get rid of the reasons why you feel it.
But why is that this old town doesn’t like looking close? What is it dying to hide? Maybe the problem isn’t the heroine’s, maybe the problem is all around her. |
Doing some snooping around, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet finds the answer to her question. The town is hiding a terrible secret.
The abandoned building next door to Uptone, before becoming a flop house where Nirvana played, was a school for Japanese American children. During World War 2 American GI’s showed up and took all the kids away at gunpoint to be incarcerated in a concentration camp at Manzanar.
For years, they say, you could sneak inside and see all the rooms left as they were, pens on paper, books open, covered with dust and spider webs. The story inspired two songs, this one and Tacoma Ballet.
Here’s what Ginsberg’s man Randy Roark had to say: “As for the contents of Tamra's mind this time out, we begin with the vague dread and paranoia common to many works of art created in the days preceding 9/11. And in at least one example truly worthy of Blake (or Kafka), the song "Manzanar Recess" is about the fascist underpinnings of concepts like "homeland" defense (using those words), and how the government will soon know where we are and what we're doing "24/7." (For those unfamiliar with Manzanar, it was a United States concentration camp built in the California desert where we interned Japanese nationals for the duration of World War II.)” |
This is the second song about the Japanese internment camp kids.
Tacoma Ballet’s bells are played by Ronnie on a guitar processed through an Electro Harmonix Frequency Analyzer.
The children playing and dogs barking were on a sound effects LP producer Wes Weresch had been saving for the day when a band would record a song about the subject.
Manzanar Recess had captured the aggressive side of the internment camp experience in America, but what about the sympathy I was feeling for the children.
I’m surprised how many listeners didn’t catch the irony when I sing about god and jesus. Not a religious affirmation, a poke at those religious warriors who in the name of misguided self righteousness harm the innocent while mouthing clichés of faith. |
It’s like seeing a UFO when you discover just how corrupt and violent most history is. And nobody wants to believe you but those who have had the same experience of discovery.
But what the hell, let’s say our heroine actually sees a UFO in the desert over by Spokane. That’s not what the song is really about anyway.
Everyone’s Got an Area 51 is about the paranoid and violent, territorial side of human beings, and the way it gets triggered by fear of the unknown. Area 51 is just another name for Manzanar. |
This song is dedicated to Tye “Lucretia” Smith one of the founders of Revolution Rising, co-editor of my infamous zine TVi, and editor of her own zine Meathook.
In the Tacoma Ballet story, our heroine visits her best friend, who reads the Tarot cards for her. Tye used to do that at Revolution Rising fund raisers. I had my tarot cards read by her just before Lucid Nation started, at a show Heavens to Betsy headlined.
A good Tarot reader can shake you up and point you right. Things may not be better but they make sense again. Choice is restored.
Ronnie’s a good Tarot reader, too, by the way. Is it automatic with these dark haired gypsy types? |
I saw an old man inside a bar glaring at and through the band. Only I noticed him. Several times in Tacoma apparently innocent scenes suggested murder to me. I didn’t know the history of the infamous Tacoma serial killer.
Some months later a body was dumped behind the recording studio, in a neglected area of long grass where I liked to stand and look out over Tacoma harbor. Apparently the victim of a drug deal gone bad.
In this song I rolled up all the paranoia into a contemplation of the old character Father Time, the ultimate killer.
In the Tacoma Ballet story this is a turning point for our heroine, some call it apathy or complacency, but maybe the best word, for the half way point in this her journey of transformation, is resignation.
Disc 1 I called “What is the Answer?” one of the two last sentences spoken by the great writer Gertrude Stein as she lay dying.
Disc 2 I called “What is the Question?” the last thing she said before she breathed her last.
The heroine of Tacoma Ballet’s answer was an oppressive history, personal, local and national, a world of bullying and decay, and resignation.
The only way to change the answer is to change the question. |
This is one of those improvisations that sounds carefully arranged. Great keyboard accents by Diane helped me give a voice to the longing of people who no longer belong where they’ve been too long. Somewhere New is one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet.
I noticed the kids playing across the street. They were mean little muthafuckers but you could understand how they got that way just by looking around.
In this old town boys still walk with sticks and
They try to hit all the dogs and make all the cracks
And they spot for cars at all the bars
And they know every single rock in this town
And they got to go find something new
Before they become the scenery too
They don’t want to sink into the concrete and sand
They want to go somewhere to a far off land
Join a gang or the Army, that was the main choice for a poor kid in Tacoma, from what I could see.
As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, disc 2 starts with a breakthrough. The heroine has a moment of illumination realizing she can leave; she doesn’t have to stay stuck in one place for life. |
The heroine of Tacoma Ballet confronts one reason for her paralyzing self contradiction. You see, there’s this guy. They aren’t together anymore. But she still loves him. So it’s not so easy to just leave home.
“Walking contradiction, living paradox” people who like this song seem to think it’s about an exasperating relationship, usually a lover or parent, occasionally a friend. It could apply as easily to anyone else, but I was talking to myself.
If you have post traumatic stress, you know the experience this song describes. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but what do you do when the different parts of you all demand action (or inaction) at once? |
The heroine face to face with one reason she won’t just leave, one reason she contradicts herself constantly. She thinks she’s still in love, that love still has a chance.
This song took on scary implications it didn’t have when mixing ended on September 10, 2001. Now I can’t hear it without thinking of those poor people making and receiving last phone calls as the towers neared collapse. Those people who jumped out of their windows, a few made messages out of their final flights.
I had been singing about relationships I had known and that I noticed around me, but now the song for me has the glint of panic, I always feel worried now on some subliminal level that my loved ones won’t be back when we’re separated.
Going through 9/11 when you already have post traumatic stress reinforced by more than one incident, well, it’s not hard to understand the chill that has descended across America. The return to churches. The guilty severity and gulping greed. |
The easiest way to find out if love is real is to go where it used to be and get drunk. Like a moth to flame her old love is back fluttering around the heroine of the Tacoma Ballet storyline. Her favorite star: is it him? Or Heineken? Maybe it’s the star on her vintage Converse sneakers.
“Friends don’t let friends drink and drive,” who knew how often that cautionary principle would provide an excuse for people to wind up in bed! It’s an especially useful sentiment when in the presence of ex’s. |
This sultry cocktail blues song about hesitant seduction was singled out by most reviewers as a highlight of Tacoma Ballet. I can’t stand it. But it does feature Ronnie’s minimalist slow hand solo intertwining with Diane’s MemoryMoog moodscape, and there’s some nasty ass bass and guitar groove by Greta and Larry.
Our heroine is confronted by a less enthusiastic than expected response to seduction. Is this smoldering erotic hesitation, or the pang of conscience, or has he really lost interest?
Maybe he would go with her? Maybe he could give her a reason to stay? Maybe she should discover that he is only memory now. Maybe she just wants to have some fun. |
After the deed is done, our heroine wakes up to that disjointed and raw feeling that is so often the result of backsliding into somewhere we no longer belong. It’s most often when you forget about simple human needs like sex, that they wind up giving you a sharp lesson about yourself.
The devil in the machine, when your sex drive is demonized is it any surprise you can’t find happiness?
This was one of the most popular songs on Tacoma Ballet, which still makes me shake my head in bewilderment. |
“Ah this is unusual,” you can hear me gripe at the beginning of the track as the band falls into that easy Americana groove once again. But a surprising song emerges anyway. That’s one of the things I enjoy about freestyle songwriting, you can be out in left field emotionally and mentally but the words and arrangement appear anyway.
On the other end of figuring out that who she thought was love is probably only memory, our heroine confronts just how alone she feels. Alone if she leaves her home town. Alone if she stays.
“If everything is alright, why’s it feel so wrong?” her boyfriend shows up and asks her. And discovering that she’s not the only one who feels the way she does, her disappointment sails into hope. |
Probably the most popular song from Tacoma Ballet is based on the groove and hook laid down by Larry Schemel, with a really cool performance by Diane on the Prophet V and Ronnie on the Seek Wah.
In the Tacoma Ballet story here the heroine confronts the real questions of love. Will he come with her when she goes? Are they truly alike? Will it be so easy to leave her family and everything she’s always known?
But at the same time she must confront her feelings of leaving her kin. That’s the price of exploring the possibilities of life. |
Ronnie’s only lead vocal on Tacoma Ballet seems to be in a different universe than my stream of consciousness adventure in whispering, but together I think we captured the erotic threat created by eye for an eye in relationships.
As for the Tacoma Ballet storyline, the heroine’s questions about love are answered. The jealous god of the old testament is not her idea of love. If she’s going to go on she has to go on alone. |
Livia, was a famous Roman Empress, wife of Augustus. Suspected of being a skilled poisoner, her political opponents did have a strange habit of choking over their wine cups.
In the Tacoma Ballet story, this song represents the moment when the heroine, in the despair of aloneness at the end of her relationship, and in fear at the threshold of leaving home, imagines she sees in herself the evil that throughout history has been unfairly blamed on the female.
Something seems so wrong with her that it can’t be fixed; her church tells her it’s original sin. |
Frightened by her own emotions, the heroine of Tacoma Ballet follows her parents’ advice and goes to the doctor for pills. Maybe instead of leaving home, she can rebalance her chemicals. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the town, or with her boyfriend, what’s wrong is something inside her.
“Set my life on an infinite loop, pour me some of that pharmaceutical soup.”
Legal (and illegal) drugs are sometimes used to numb the pain that we should be feeling, the pain that’s there to tell us something is wrong with our lives. .
“I’m not sick, I’m just sick of this.” |
Jack Endino’s favorite song, and one of the more popular tracks from Tacoma Ballet, Happy gets its ironic Jamaican party flavor Diane’s keyboard playing, and a great mix by Dawn Pfund.
For some reason some reviewers, including Rolling Stone, thought this was a cover of the Rolling Stones song “Happy.”
As for the storyline of Tacoma Ballet, the heroine now properly dosed takes her place in the army of the resigned where happiness is a responsibility, and how you appear is more important than who you are.
Do you know people like this? Pick up your shit and stop whining they say, like the whole world is on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. March along with a smile on your face and do what you’re told or else. They’ve stopped noticing how angry they are. |
In the storyline this is the heroine’s goodbye to her hometown. It’s not a friendly farewell. Often they aren’t. This one only takes a moment. She’s not taking much with her to start her new life.
But this song should be equally applicable for all sorts of situations, that’s why I named it Universal Application; it’s a tool of many uses. |
Liberty Street is where Patti Smith stood after 9/11 to write her first poem about it.
In Tacoma Ballet’s storyline, this song finds the heroine happy on Liberty Street in New York City. She is free, she is living a life she wants to live. Not many countries in the world allow women that right.
“She goes where she wants to because she can see everything.
She doesn’t care about nothin’ but being a happy girl on her own.” |
I guess our heroine got in a band! It’s natural to want to spread the good news of how you can really choose to live your life the way you want to and doing that is the most important thing an American can do, especially an American female.
But all I was thinking about when I sang this song was the loss of the wonderful all ages scene that once existed all across America, which included clubs like Impala, PCH Club and Jabberjaw in Los Angeles, Small Intestine in Baltimore, 47 Nautical Miles in Portland, and many others.
I was remembering rolling up in a van in Couer D’Alene Idaho and the timid group of punk kids who explained nobody really played shows there not even local bands, only Top 40 bands in restaurant bars.
I can’t understand how the music business can abandon all those kids who love music and aren’t old enough to buy it online or to go to most shows. Anyone who loves rock and roll music knows what it means to kids to have their own bands and places to see real bands, not musical product. |
The final track of Tacoma Ballet, a surprisingly tender and comforting song, inspired by Patty Schemel’s keyboard riff provided the perfect backdrop for my vocals about survival.
The story of Tacoma Ballet ends with the heroine out in the world, strong enough to smile in the rain, strong enough to come home and find comfort in the familiar evergreens, strong enough to go back into the world, anywhere she wants to go she can go.
I had no idea I was telling a story when I sang these songs. But the story is clear to me now. Ronnie noticed it first. Ginsberg’s man Randy Roark saw it right away, too.
When a graduate student in literature who likes my music dropped an outline on me, the anatomy of the story of Tacoma Ballet, I realized my experiment in trusting the creativity of the unconscious had been more successful than I could have hoped.
That’s more important to me than the fact that Tacoma Ballet made it to number one on the radio. But that both seemingly impossible things happened, that makes me smile. |
I was going to call this track Titanic Overture as a nod to the original Alice Cooper Group, one of my favorite bands.
But then the title “Haunted by Sirens in the Fog” came to me. Since I’m talking about both kinds of sirens, to me this instrumental suggests the horrors of bottoming addictions.
It also points toward the God Speed You Black Emperor flavored recordings of Episode Seven: Mung Jung Bushi, when Jean Smith and David Lester of Mecca Normal joined us and master drummer LaFrae Olivia Sci for a session of instrumental improvisations. |
This is another of my several portraits of post traumatic stress and hyper vigilance. The band cooks up a good groove. I open with an imitation of the insecurity and politics of scenes. Then the nagging question: do you feel safe? Post traumatic stress shows itself stuck in repetition. You lose all sense of time and reason in those seconds when the fear rekindles.
But then does anyone really feel like “it’s okay to be here?” Aristotle said that souls in bodies experience a horror best compared to the Etruscan pirate torture of tying a prisoner face to face with a corpse. Our prison is so beautiful sometimes you can forget even while remembering.
But with PST you seldom remember while forgetting, you get stuck on repeat, almost like ritualized re-enactment of what happened to you, that nags your life, can even ruin it, until you find your way to heal. |
In my mind the word love is misapplied when it’s included with words like duty, guilt, responsibility, and the sacrifice of happiness and purpose.
When conformity and collective obligations outweigh what makes a woman herself, when she surrenders her identity under pressure to accept the acceptable role, to me it seems she becomes a human sacrifice. Not that the same thing doesn’t happen to men every day. |
Whenever I hear this I want to pick up a DV cam and randomly film; preferably disturbing urban and rural scenes in black and white.
Edit a cheesy police car chase from an 80’s adventure flick in for the intro, then montage the bleak black and white footage, intercut with grainy night color street scenes appearing like visions. |
You just know that somewhere in America on September 10 2001 some poor asshole was giving a speech to a captive audience or family, in a corporate board room, or perhaps at backyard barbecue, going on and on about how you have to be an optimist, that tomorrow is a new dawn, that great things are about to happen and the world is becoming a better place every single day.
Man, they felt dumb the next day. Ironically, their optimism is more needed than ever after 9/11. This instrumental is dedicated to them. |
This heavy on the echo mix is sparse and dreamy, it doesn’t fit the storyline as well as the version on Tacoma Ballet but I like it some ways more. You really get to hear mom ladling out her famous home made guilt at the holiday dinner.
It’s almost like a cross cultural cult, the cult of you have to spend the holiday with your families, even if it’s damaging to all, or just you. |
Diane does some really sweet work on the MemoryMoog on this track. I also like when Larry kicks in about half way through and then backs down in the groove over which Diane shimmers spacey sounds.
Show me something new, I’m screaming at the band and at the world. I don’t want oil anymore. I want the next thing. I don’t want the greedy liars of self serving government anymore, I want efficient management. It’s not just the music that hasn’t changed enough.
And the thing is we’re on the verge of major change. If an environmental disaster, economic collapse, or war doesn’t pull the legs out of our fragile global culture, the changes technologies like nano and biotech are bringing in the near future will make these our days seem quaint very soon. |
We would walk down the street toward the waterfront for a meal about half way through recording every day in Tacoma. I liked those day time walks past the long grass lots, the water stretching out bright ahead.
Since we were out I’d overhear things, notice little interactions between people. In a pub I noticed a couple bickering. They were a drunk and she said something about “going around in circles.” The interesting thing is you couldn’t quite tell if this was a seduction or the end of a relationship. That’s an example of the process that usually starts a song for me when we do freestyle experiments.
Ronnie’s use of the Seek Wah pedal and Larry’s use of his wah wah created for me an image of water emptying into a drain that linked up with the idea of going around in circles. |
Light and Shadow was the name of a critically acclaimed but obscure zine I did about how I dealt with post traumatic stress when I was touring.
Since I had been abducted into a car in tenth grade and nearly murdered there, being stuck in a van through the highs and lows of a national tour was a very intense experience.
This track focuses on the disassociation that comes with post traumatic stress. The way nothing seems to be where it’s supposed to be, including yourself.
I love the way Wes mixed my vocal in this so it’s like you’re overhearing someone confessing their innermost confusion. |
The title is of course post 9/11. I have no idea what I was thinking of when I recorded it but today Ronnie’s Arabic sounding lick and the lyrics I came up with remind me of the confusion I felt stuck in a Tacoma hotel room watching endless repeats of the planes hitting the towers on the day I was supposed to fly home to Los Angeles.
All I kept wondering was why and how? How did the culture of Islam, once known for its superior tolerance, beautiful art, deepest poetry, and advanced medicine, why was it now famous for suicide bombers?
One of my favorite women in history is the great Sufi poetess Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya. They say she ran through the streets of her home town with a bucket of water and a burning torch. “What are you trying to do?” she was asked. “Burn down heaven and quench the fires of hell,” she answered. She wanted religious people to understand that greed and fear are not the same as love.
END OF EPISODE SIX
NEXT EPISODE SEVEN: MUNG JUNG BUSHI + MISC |
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