Lonesome Pie

Many years later, I found myself in LA, pursuing my dream to become a film editor. I had been around for a couple of years and made a few friends in the industry and had just started climbing the editing ladder. I’d paid my dues (both metaphorically and financially) by slogging through several straight-to-video releases and learning the craft of editing and joining the union and had managed to work my way up to first assistant editor. Thanks to repeated badgering and the graces of the editor, I got a job being the assistant on a feature documentary about the life and work of Ayn Rand. I’ve always liked documentaries and was pleased to be working on one, but would’ve taken anything at that point as I’d been out of work for several months and was getting desperately low on funds. As it turned out, the director and the editor had a falling out a few months into the film and I ended up finishing the editing and got my first credit on a film that would eventually go on to be nominated for (and lose) the Academy Award.

But before I was promoted, I had my own little room in the back of an apartment in West Hollywood, trying to keep the thousands of pieces of film and paper organized while the editor and the director chewed through the scenes in the next room. I was sitting at my bench, filing trims – the lifeblood of an assistant film editor – when the phone rang. It was Matt, calling to chat. Matt and I had both gone to Hampshire College, but we didn’t really know each other there. However, he and my wife G were good friends and, when we were casting around for somebody to help us share an apartment in Brooklyn, his name came up. He was living in a horrible airless room in lower Manhattan and, after a bit of cajoling, we convinced him to move in with us.

I was excited the day he moved in because he was the only person I knew who had about as many records as I did. I was stunned to discover, however, that he and I had virtually no records in common. While my collection was heavily skewed towards new wave and electronica, his consisted almost entirely of punk, jazz, and classical. Well, not so much punk, exactly, although he had plenty of that, but more like alternative rock, before there was such a thing. He loved his Pixies and his Dinosaur Jr., and his Bags, and also had a fondness for some of the old-school heavy hitters (Led Zeppelin, AC/DC). Most of his music I found too aggressively ugly and locked in the traditional guitar/bass/drums paradigm to really embrace and most of my music he found to be too self-consciously arty and soulless. But we did have a few things in common. We both enjoyed the Cocteau Twins and we both harbored a soft spot for the B-52’s first album and, of course (being human beings), we both liked the Beatles.

Over the two years we lived together, Matt and I became close friends. We loved to rag on each other’s musical inclinations and we loved to hang out, smoke pot, and watch movies. Matt was as much of a film junky as I was, and we’d spend many bleary hours discussing the relative merits of certain films. Matt was also the person who really got me interested in the Academy Awards as a betting proposition. It was in Brooklyn that we started the tradition which is still going strong of wagering with each other on the outcome of each year’s Oscars. The true game, I quickly learned, was not to determine which film or person deserved the award in a given category, but which one was going to win. That’s a much different discipline. After the fiasco of Silence of the Lambs winning best picture (nobody in their right mind would’ve picked that), we were hooked on the competition and would breathless await the nominee announcement in February and then painfully torture ourselves for the next month trying to out psyche the academy and each other. Oscar night is still one of the biggest holidays of the year for both of us (not to mention the rest of LA), and neither of us would dream of letting one slip past without enjoying it in each other’s company.

Matt, like me, worked odd jobs in New York, spending most of the time just trying to make rent and not worrying so much about a career, per se. He had been in a reasonably successful band at Hampshire called Beatrice (as in “We’re Beatrice” (and you’re not)) and also apparently harbored dreams of rock ‘n’ roll superstardom, but kept those pretty well hidden in Brooklyn. Publicly, like me, he professed a desire to get into the film business and, also like me, he found that virtually impossible in NYC, so after a couple of years, we decided to pack up our bags and girlfriends and move to LA.

So anyway, here it was, four years later, and Matt was on the phone. He was a month from his 29th birthday and had decided that if he was going to be a big rock ‘n’ roll star, he had better get a move on, so he had taken the first steps to forming a band. He dragged a bunch of old songs out of his notebooks and was busy writing new ones and had enlisted a mutual friend of ours as a bass player and had had a few rehearsals with him. I enthusiastically encouraged him in this pursuit, delighted that a friend of mine had the guts to follow his bliss. I asked him how the rehearsals had been going and he said they were alright, but he wasn’t totally happy with John, the bassist. It wasn’t that John wasn’t competent on the bass, but that he was perhaps too competent – he had his own ideas about what to play that clashed with Matt’s ideas and, Matt confided, John was too involved in his career to really make a commitment to being in a band. But, for the time being, it was going well and it was nice to be able to flesh out some of his songs and take them more seriously.

Suddenly, he stopped.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “ how would you like to be in the band?”

“Me?” I replied, incredulously, “I can’t play any instruments.”

“No, no, no,” he said, warming up to the idea, “it’ll be great. I’ll teach you how to play the bass. It’s easy and I’m sure you could pick it up quickly. Then you’ll play what I want you to play and you’ll be more fun on the road than John and besides, there’s nothing better than being in a band with your best friend.”

It was the first time Matt had referred to me as his best friend and all this band talk was starting to awaken a long denied fantasy. How could I resist? We agreed to get together that weekend for my first lesson.

When I arrived, Matt pulled a large case out of his closet and opened it up. Inside was an old Rickenbacker electric bass, a little beat up but no worse for the wear. It was a bass a friend had leant to him in high school and which Matt had been holding onto since then – some fifteen years. He plugged it in to a bass amp and showed me how to use an electric tuner to tune it up. I slung it over my shoulders and was ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

We started with a country tune of his called Gas Tank that was a perfect introduction to the instrument because of its slow and simple bass line. Having studied the viola in my youth, I was somewhat familiar with the concept of playing a four string instrument tuned in fourths, so I was able to pick it up fairly quickly. After our first successful run through, I was flushed with excitement and shiny with accomplishment. Matt handed me the bass case. “Welcome to the band, “ he grinned.

The next test was to determine whether or not I could sing. As a youth, I sang often and with gusto, until one day, in Junior Orchestra at the National Music Camp, I was singing along with a group of boys and one of them turned to me and said, “you’re off key, can’t you tell?” Truth was, I couldn’t, and I figured that meant my ear was unreliable, so in group singing situations from that point on, I just opened my mouth and pretended to sing.

Matt taught me the bass line and harmony to an old country/rockabilly song called I’m Lonesome and then made a tape of him singing and playing his part so I could practice mine. After a couple of weeks, he came over with his guitar and we locked ourselves in my office and worked through it. I was terrified, and my voice shook with uncertainty. Matt encouraged me and gave me a few pointers and we ran through it a few times until I felt a little more comfortable. After about an hour, he said it was time to perform, and we came out into the living room where G was reading and played and sang our way through the song. I was still terrified, but I was excited too, and G’s face glowed with admiration (she later told me she fell in love with both of us again that night). I was hooked.

Over the next few weeks, Matt and I practiced and worked on new tunes. We played occasionally with Whitey, Matt’s multi-instrumentalist roommate, who played in mutual friend Sage’s western swing band The Lucky Stars (Sage and Matt had been in Beatrice together at Hampshire and in the Toughskins in LA. The Toughskins main claim to fame is that Beck once opened for them at Raji’s, long before anybody knew who he was). Whitey added the occasional accordion and mandolin to some of Matt’s songs, giving them a more wistful, rural feel. Before long, we had a half a dozen songs in more-or-less working order and Matt decided it was time for he and I to cut our teeth in public, and found a local coffeehouse (Anastasia’s Asylum) that had an open mike night and signed us up.

A lot of friends charitably showed up that night to listen to us go through our three songs. I was again terrified at the prospect, but as the other people got up to perform, I began to relax. Some of them were alright, but a lot of them sucked terribly and I knew we were better than most of the people that night. Our time came and we got up to perform and I thought I was going to pass out from nerves, but I focused myself on the task at hand and we got through our set with our pride intact. As we finished and were walking downstairs, the manager of the coffeehouse asked if we’d be interested in doing a full set on our own in the future, and, grinning, we agreed.