Lonesome Pie

The Lonesome Pie story is one of the great tragedies of rock ‘n’ roll. Powerfully original and shamefully overlooked, the band slogged through a couple of years of critical and popular disinterest, recording a remarkably varied and self-assured album and followed it up with an even more polished four-song EP before internal tensions and lack of focus blew the band apart and sent its members into permanent obscurity, not even meriting a footnote to an appendix in the official annals of popular music history.

Okay, so maybe it isn’t one of the great tragedies of rock ‘n’ roll in general, but it certainly is one of the great tragedies in my own personal history of popular music and since this bloated document is nothing more than a solipsistic musical wankfest, I will indulge myself in putting down on paper – for the first time ever – the true story of the rise and fall of Lonesome Pie, by one of only two or three people that could tell it. Or if not the true story, at least a true story, for I was there when it all began.

Most adolescent boys I know secretly (or not so secretly) wish they were in a rock ‘n’ roll band. To a pimply, invisible thirteen-year-old with a monster in his pants, the glamour and public adoration of the rock star lifestyle is irresistible. Some just dream the dream and grow out of it, some take up an instrument and torture it for awhile before realizing that it’s not for them, others cobble together garage groups and play at the odd school dance or union hall before moving on to more practical pursuits, and still others – the rarest of the lot – put talent and perseverance and charisma (not to mention no small amount of luck) together and actually become a band and record and sell records and go on tour. And of that miniscule percentage of bands that actually do well enough to support themselves, only a tiny portion of those bands go on to become rich and famous. But so what? You don’t dream of the things that are likely, you dream of the impossible – otherwise, what’s the point of dreaming? No adolescent lies awake at night, fantasizing about flipping burgers for not quite enough money to move out of the spare room over his folks’ garage. If you’re going to fantasize, it might as well be about standing on stage before thousands of screaming fans, being chased around by hordes of rabid groupies, decadently hoovering up expensive booze and exotic drugs, and flipping off that school counselor who told you you’d never amount to anything as you drive by in your neon purple stretch limo with the putting green and helicopter landing pad on top.

Rock ‘n’ roll!

When I was a tender youth, I fell firmly into the first camp. I was a dreamer, but I had no real aspirations to be in a band and made no real steps to getting into one. For starters, I didn’t play any good rock ‘n’ roll instruments. I could noodle around a bit on the piano, but the piano, alas, is not a rock ‘n’ roll instrument. Part of the problem is that the piano – like all keyboard instruments – is a very precise instrument. There are 88 possible notes and once you’ve played one, it just fades away and radiates – you can’t change the pitch or the dynamics or affect the sound at all. It’s a very binary instrument, with notes either off or on and getting softer. Electric guitars, in contrast, are largely about shaping the sound once the note’s been played. You can bend notes and change textures and sustain forever. It’s very organic and human and expressive and messy in contrast to the clean mechanical purity of the piano. The piano’s too cerebral to rock.

I did, however, spend one summer – the one between 8th and 9th grade – fantasizing about being in a band. I spent a couple of weeks that summer at my grandmother’s house, and as I was just discovering the wonderful world of popular music, I had my ear glued to the radio day and night. In between chores and social obligations, I would sit in one of the spare bedrooms listening to Joe Jackson and the Knack and Blondie and Toto and build elaborate stage sets out of Lego, or spend hours designing the flashy costumes me and my bandmates would wear (intuitively understanding, even at that tender age, that how you looked was at least as important as what you played – if not more). My fantasy band was called Indigo and we all had blue (duh) outfits with different colored accents (kind of a mid-seventies superhero aesthetic) and played on a massive stage that formed a pyramid and had lots of cool lights and smoke machines and explosions and stuff like that. As far as what we played, well, I never did work that out, but it was an entertaining fantasy to get me through the long hot Seattle summer.

Later, after high school, my friend Allen tried to convince me to form a band with him (he, of the low register ilk, played tuba and had just picked up the electric bass). We actually worked out a few instrumentals, but we both knew they sucked and so I moved to NYC with Eric to seek my fame and fortune (not a good place to look for it, too few fame, too many seekers) and, once again, gave up my dream to be in a band.

And, frankly, it wasn’t much of a dream to give up. I’ve always wanted to create music, but have preferred the mad scientist twiddling knobs in the middle of the night scenario to the blues-based rock ‘n’ roll driving around Nebraska in a van with a bunch of sweaty guys type of dream (hard to understand, I know). So I contented myself with saving up to buy a synthesizer and a 4-track recorder and doing a little knob twiddling in my spare time.