Lonesome Pie

Okay, that’s not true – or fair. It wasn’t the birth of Owen that killed the band. I did take some time off to try to adjust to our new family paradigm, but Lonesome Pie continued to flourish for a little more than a year after that. A month after Owen’s birth, we played our biggest gig, at the cavernous Loft in Pasadena, and played to an almost full house. The vultures in the sound booth kindly offered to sell us a DAT of our show for $50. We politely declined and opted for the $20 cassette, only to discover that it was probably the worst recording ever made of us – even the videotapes we made by sticking a camera up at the back of Al’s Bar while we played sounded better than that “professional” tape made on a “professional” board by those “professionals”.

Then we had the misfortune of playing the Gig in West LA at 8:00 on Thursday, May 14, 1998. If that date doesn’t have the same ring as November 23, 1963, or September 11, 2001, it was still a monumental day as it was the airdate of the final Seinfeld show. We could barely get the bartender to show up (whatsa matter, nobody ever heard of VCRs?). I have an acquaintance in another band who excitedly reported back to his bandmates that he had gotten them a free gig (they didn’t have to pay to play) at the hallowed Whiskey on the Sunset Strip for some Monday night in March. The band was stoked until they realized that was Oscar night. In Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the band plugged on, gathering small kudos along the way – such as getting played on one of LA’s biggest and best known radio stations, the giant KROQ, and being invited to play at the first day of the International Pop Overthrow, a pop festival organized in response to the more popular and better-funded Poptopia. But there were clouds on the horizon, and they were getting darker. Matt has a history of getting bored with working on ongoing projects and wanting to just scrap them and move on to something else. There were at least two times when I had to talk him down and find out what about the band was bugging him so we could try to fix the nose without throwing the whole face away.

The first time he threatened to break up the band was because of my singing. I was never fully confident of my ability, largely because of my inability to accurately hear and adjust my pitch and because of being chastised for it as a kid. Matt thought I showed potential at the beginning and figured it was just something I would grow into. After waiting for a couple of years and not hearing any improvement, he took me to task about it. It was a difficult conversation. I was hurt and defensive because I thought I was doing all right but really had no way of knowing. It would sometimes take me a couple of passes to get all the parts right for one of my songs, but we’d all eventually be happy with the way it came out, so I didn’t think there was a real problem. As far as live singing went, well, I had no idea. I had to rely on other people’s opinions and most people seemed to think I was at least an adequate singer for the material – I wasn’t going to put Michael Stipe or Thom Yorke (or Bryan Ferry or David Sylvian) out of business, but my voice got the job done. Or so I thought. But Matt felt otherwise and he felt it was holding the band back and that it was his duty and obligation to do what he could to make the band better. I was angry because I was disappointed and embarrassed to think I had been humiliating myself every time I opened my mouth on stage. We talked it out for a long time and I agreed to give up most of my singing duties – which, in the long run, was a bit of a relief. And the band puttered on.

Later, Matt was again vaguely dissatisfied with the sound of the band – especially live – and so we decided to look for another guitarist, one who could sing and take over some of the harmony parts I was (apparently) struggling with. This wasn’t nearly as easy as finding Jeff to play drums – in which the perfect candidate was the only one who showed up. We sent out word through our small networks and spent a couple of rehearsals trying out different people. These rehearsals inevitably ended up being wastes of time, because we could almost always tell within the first five minutes that somebody wasn’t right for the band but couldn’t very well kick them out right then, so we’d play with them for a couple of hours and then never see them again. This happened a few times until Jeff mentioned this friend of his, Don, who was a good guitarist but not somebody Jeff thought would be right for us. But since Jeff’s instincts were often exactly the opposite of what Matt and I felt, we invited Don to play with us one Saturday. He came in, we chatted while setting up, ran down the chords of one of our easier songs (Neatness Counts) and started playing. By the time we reached the second verse, I knew we had our guitarist. I glanced over at Matt after the song was over and could tell from the glow in his eyes that he felt the same way too.

Adding Don to the mix really revitalized Lonesome Pie for a while. Don was a real guitarist (sorry Matt) and brought an enormous amount of potential to the Lonesome Pie sound. It was as if each song was brand new as we played with the arrangements and the structures to make the best use of our new four-piece status. When we played our first gig as a foursome – in a packed gig at The Joint – the response was immediate and exciting. Friends and fans of the band (same thing) told us how much thicker and more interesting the sound was and how we had really taken a big step forward by incorporating Don.

Energized, I was inspired to quickly write five songs for our new line-up: the goofy Monkey, inspired by my semi-regular poker game, the frothy punk pop of Californication (I must point out, this was well before The Red Hot Chili Peppers album of the same name came out), the faux-folky Gasoline, in which Matt did his best John Cougar Mellancamp impersonation, the crunchy superpop of Idiot Savant (one of my favorite compositions), and the instrumental Under Crust, inspired by a break in a Barry Manilow song (no, really).

Anxious to get our new sound on tape, we booked time at Art of Noise and spent two weekends recording four songs, Gasoline and Monkey from me and Out of Season and Poor You from Matt. Although they took longer to record and mix with four us, the results were very satisfying, and I, for one, looked forward to doing some more.

And that’s when Matt decided he’d had enough. Tired with the popularity plateau we’d been sitting on and with the amount of his weekend that was given up to rehearsals, Matt decided he didn’t want to do it any more. He encouraged us to continue without him, and said he’d hope that we could get back together again in the future, but I, for one, knew that was the end. I didn’t have the energy or enthusiasm to try to talk him out of it again, and so we agreed to put the band to bed after our next show, booked for a Saturday night at the Westwood Brewery.

As it turned out, the show was a great success. The other band cancelled and so we had a double set – allowing us to play virtually everything in our repertoire. We were sharp and I got many compliments after the show was over – people saying it was the best we ever sounded. After basking in the afterglow for a bit, I put my bass away, exchanged a wordless and sorrow-filled glance with Jeff, packed up my amp, and walked out into the night.

A couple of weeks later, Matt’s old high school buddy John came visiting and found out I wasn’t really using his old Rickenbacker bass anymore, and he took it back. Now I couldn’t play, even if I wanted to.

The break-up of the band hit me very hard. Part of it – a large part – was the fact that I’d no longer have this golden chunk of time every week devoted solely to something I wanted to do, and something I couldn’t be interrupted from. Without that, my time to work on my own projects became harder and harder to defend and threatened to disappear entirely. It wasn’t for lack of trying or respect on my wife G’s part, but because I was trying to work in the house with Owen, our young son, running around and the phone ringing and what not, I could never really concentrate on anything. And that was very hard. I had already felt like I had compromised a great deal of my own autonomy and free time by having a child and that loss was just intensified by the break-up of the band.

I loved playing in the band and making music and working in collaboration again, and losing that was another bitter pill to swallow. I suppose Don and Jeff and I could’ve carried on in one form or the other, but I just didn’t have the energy to do it. I liked my relatively privileged position in Lonesome Pie where I had a great deal of creative input but very little responsibility. I didn’t have to hustle gigs or sweet talk club owners or any of the day-to-day grind that running a band entails and I didn’t want to have to start doing that. So I retreated back into my shell, working largely by myself again (with the notable exception of a satisfying collaboration with G on a combined journal covering her pregnancy and the first year of Owen’s life). But it just wasn’t the same.

I also really regret not trying to keep the band together long enough to record our new material. Matt had been writing some great songs at the end and some of my favorite songs – Idiot Savant, Californication, Under Crust – never got recorded and are lost to the ages now. I should’ve pushed harder for that, but I was so demoralized and depressed that I let the chance slip away through my fingers.

But perhaps the worst part of the break-up of Lonesome Pie is what it did to my friendship with Matt. Before the band, we were great friends, and we loved to hang out and go to movies and talk about anything and everything. Once the band got going, however, most of our time together was consumed with it – whether rehearsing or gigging or writing or recording or planning. When that all suddenly disappeared, so did much of our friendship. That’s a little overly dramatic – it isn’t like we never speak to each other. But now I see him once every month or two and weeks go by without one of us calling the other. The band isn’t solely to blame for this, of course – he’s been very busy surviving the extremely demanding schedule that is de rigueur for television production personnel and I’ve been consumed with raising my family. Although we technically live in the same city, that city is the notoriously sprawly LA, and it takes a good hour to get to his apartment from my house. And that’s time that’s hard to come by. So we’ve gone from best friends to something else – something less. And that’s really why the Lonesome Pie story is one of the great tragedies of rock ‘n’ roll.