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.

What surprises me most about these musical sketches, Lucid Nation’s baby steps, besides how good they are (though the guitar playing occasionally staggers like a newborn kitten) is how timeless they are.  Many make more sense now than when they were written.

Here is Lucid Nation before riot grrrl changed our lives, when it was only Ronnie and me in a cockroach infested apartment in Hollywood, California.   He wanted me to sing but I refused.  My voice had been taken from me in high school by violence at the hands of family and strangers.  I had learned to keep my mouth shut and walk two steps behind, like a good dog. 

When I met him, Ronnie was lead singer for a scary band with a racist streak that rocked the biker clubs of the North Valley.  He was eighteen at the time with dyed blue black hair, always in black, six feet tall and just over a hundred pounds, and if you looked close you’d notice Nazi insignia stylishly placed.  I was impressed that a Jewish kid had found a way to become a redneck messiah.  His skin was getting a green tone though and his alcohol intake was over a bottle a night and the only other thing he consumed was cereal.

If you can believe it, when we met, I actually went to him for protection from a scary situation that was brewing thanks to an idiot friend of mine who liked to invite musicians back to our apartment then disappear with one and leave me in trouble.  This time I could tell I was in real trouble.   I don’t know how I knew that Ronnie was the one to turn to, I was even warned away from him by the guy who ran the club, but Ronnie turned out to be a loyal defender. 

I think I was the first real friend he ever had.  I discovered that underneath all that fearsome nihilism was what had once been a really cool fourteen year old kid into ecology and the tarot.  He had good reason to be so pissed.  Hell, most of his family had been slaughtered in concentration camps.

I watched him suffer through a succession of guitarists until I announced I would learn to play so I could be his guitarist.  He was skeptical at first.  No more so than I!  But I figured if those idiots could play guitar, I was at least that stupid.

Then Ronnie had a dream about a blues man pulling up on the corner in an old black Caddy limo.  The blues man told Ronnie he should play guitar, then he gave him one of those funny jazz cigarettes and said “Now you gonna see some flowers!” 

Ronnie was so haunted by the face in the dream I drove him to my favorite used record store and made him look through all the old records in the jazz and blues section.  “That’s the guy,” he said across the store holding up Muddy Waters Live on Stovall’s Plantation.

So began our love for the blues.  Ronnie decided to learn guitar, too.  We began writing songs as soon as we had three chords and a couple lead patterns down.  When we had our second batch of a dozen songs we ran an ad for a drummer, I think we mentioned Muddy Waters, something about Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and The Stones, too. 

An A&R guy telephoned us from Columbia Records.  We thought it was a crank call.  The ad had intrigued him.  Our conversation intrigued him more.  He wanted us to visit his office with CD in hand.  Well, all we had was a cassette tape.  You’re going to hear tracks from that tape this episode. 

Columbia liked what they heard on the cassette and we were invited to do more recording.  Picture an old Teac half inch eight track reel to reel recorder and some low end Lexicon outboard gear, a rack mount British eight track mixer without a rack, a decent mic, a cheap synth, all on the floor in an apartment with neighbors who complained if we disturbed the silence of the semi-dead.  

The demos were good enough that we were passed up to the higher brass at Columbia, who completely creeped us out with lechery and Cole Porter. 

I played most of the bass lines on these recordings and about half the guitar parts, I wrote about half the music, but again, no singing, no matter what.   Happily, riot grrrl soon took care of that, and from cocoons emerged butterflies, or at least pterodactyls. 

Remember these are the rawest of raw recordings.  You are hearing us in the living room of an apartment in Hollywood.  For the first bunch of tracks we used a cheap hand held cassette, cheap guitars, and cheap combo tube amps straight from the local pawn shop.   Personally I think the rawness makes these tracks even better.