Lonesome Pie

Meanwhile, there was the problem of a name. As it was Matt’s band, he got ultimate say in what it was to be called, but he opened the floor up for suggestions. He had thought of a couple of possibilities and had taken to writing one of them large on a piece of paper and hanging it on the wall to look at. After all, the name’s got to look good as well as sound good. He was leaning towards a neo-country feel in the band and wanted something that was sort of associated with the country. His first choice, partly as a tribute to the Bags, one of his favorite unknown bands, was The Feedbags. The Feedbags looks pretty good, but it sounds stupid, and so he rejected that. He also toyed with the idea of calling the band Weed Whacker, hoping to play off the double-entendre in the title, but that didn’t stick either.

About that time, he and Whitey decided to throw a party, and favor the guests with some of our tunes. The party went well, although I was buzzing with excitement and nervousness all night, waiting for our moment. It turns out that Whitey was buzzing too, but in a different way. He had been having some trouble controlling his alcohol intake (he has since gotten sober) and when it came time to play, he was pretty much incomprehensible – both verbally and musically. But, the show must go on, so we set up on the patio and our friends gathered in chairs around us. Somebody asked what the name of the band was and we had to confess we didn’t have one yet and were looking for suggestions.

Although nervous, I was relishing the evening. It was the kind of nervousness that meant I was pushing myself past where I knew I could go. I had spent too long safely pursuing easy goals and not taking that terrifying do-or-die plunge into the unknown that this band represented. Playing it safe, I knew, was a cop out, because if you didn’t really try, you always had an out if you failed. Pouring yourself fully into something and then failing was a lot riskier, but the rewards were much greater. It had been years since I really took a chance like this, and I felt myself coming to life, waking up after a long dormancy, achieving imago.

The first couple of songs went well, despite Whitey’s drunken noodling. We paused for a moment, considering what to play next. G piped up, “play Lonesome,” referring to the song she first heard us sing together.

“Fuck that,” Martha replied, “play Pie”. Pie was a strident, difficult tune filled with lots of strange dissonances that Matt had written years before.

G didn’t favor Pie much, so she called out again for Lonesome. Others started picking up the chant.

“Play Lonesome.”

“Play Pie.”

“Lonesome!”

“Pie!”

“Lonesome!

“Pie!”

“Looks like you’ve got a name,” Sage called out, and indeed we had. From that night on, we were known as Lonesome Pie.

As my confidence playing with Matt increased, I decided to see if I could write a song. Despite my couple of weeks with Allen right out of high school, I had no real experience, but I’d certainly heard a lot of songs in my life and knew a teeny tiny bit about chord progressions so I thought I’d give it a go – besides, lack of a strong working knowledge of music theory hadn’t dissuaded thousands of other bozos from writing songs and it certainly wasn’t going to stop me either. My first attempt was inspired by a real life crisis. My wife, G, had just confessed that she had lied about using birth control in an underhanded attempt to get pregnant without my knowledge. It was a terrific blow, one that I wasn’t sure we would survive. The couple of days after this confession were horrific. She was due to go out of town to a conference for a few days and it was all I could do to wait until she left. So I decided to write an anti-love song.

In high school, I didn’t have much luck with the ladies – at least not until the end of my senior year. My roommate and best friend Eric had the same problem – even though he looked like a GQ model (and, in fact, ended up on their pages a few years later) – that just seemed to make him irresistible to lots of gay men. Anyway, we were both pretty cynical about teen romance during our first year together – my junior year. That spring we got the opportunity to DJ a Saturday night dance, which was centerpiece of the weekend, the social ground zero. As it happened, the weekend we got to DJ was Valentine’s Day, so we had a good old time not playing any syrupy love songs. Scott, one of our hall mates, came up to the booth to plead his case. There was some hot babe that had agreed to dance with him if a slow tune came on. We listened to him sympathetically. Then we told him to fuck off. Ten minutes later he came up, begging. We sent him packing. Another ten minutes and he was on the verge of violence, so we told him to calm down, go find his honey, and we’d play him a damn slow love song. We carefully chose the right track and cued it up. I peered out through the booth and caught Scott’s eye, giving him the big thumbs up. He went and found his mark and we segued into the beautiful opening to the Split Enz track I Hope I Never. The beauty of this song is that it has all the form of a love ballad – syrupy strings, arpeggiated piano, melodramatic vocal cheese – but it’s actually a hate song. It’s a song about somebody who’s sick to death of his partner and all the grief she’s caused. The verses lay out the evidence and set the mood and then the chorus comes swooping in:

Scott was not amused.

As a deep tangent, there’s another song like this that I adored in high school. The edgy group The Tubes had some minor early success with their track White Punks on Dope (covered and translated, to glorious effect, by Nina Hagen), but as their career continued, they became less and less popular and more of a commercial liability. Finally, from what I assume was corporate pressure to turn a profit, they released an album called The Completion Backwards Principle. The entire album is set up like a business seminar, in which one envisions the corporation’s ultimate goal and then works backwards from there to figure out how to start and which path to take to succeed. The band dressed up in suits and ties and gave themselves important sounding faux-corporate job descriptions (Fee Waybill, the singer, is in charge of Motivation, Bill Spooner and Roger Steen, guitarists, are responsible for Analysis and Development and drummer Prairie Prince, who later worked on the legendary album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as well as becoming XTC’s favorite studio drummer, is listed as being in charge of Systems). Because they wanted (or, at least, were pressured to want) mainstream acceptability, they produced their songs to sound as radio friendly as possible. It’s a remarkable document. The form of all the songs is spot on perfect MOR (“middle of the road”) pabulum, indistinguishable from the real schlock that drooled out of the radio by the hour. But, being the Tubes, they couldn’t really completely disguise their true anarchist nature, and the songs themselves are perverse little narratives, ranging from slightly twisted to completely obscene. My favorite one of these, and the one song from the album to actually crack the holy Top 40, is a track called I Don’t Wanna Wait Anymore. It’s sheer genius. It sounds exactly like the kind of overblown ballad that dreckmeisters like Chicago and Air Supply were churning out to nauseating effect at the time. They perfectly capture the form, from the heroic singing over a lush, lugubrious orchestration to the soaring twin lead guitars and patented Barry Manilow modulation. But the lyrics tell a different story entirely. The singer sets up a scenario in which he and the woman of his dreams have found themselves alone and afraid in a foreboding landscape:

He then goes on to construct other possible scenarios in which the object of his desire succumbs to his dubious charms. It’s a wonderful piece of sonic cynicism and appealed to me greatly during those long lonely loveless years of adolescence.

So the idea of writing an anti-love song in the form of a love song really appealed to me and, since I was freshly (and deeply) wounded by the woman who was supposed to take care of me, I had the perfect motivation. Although I knew deep down that we’d survive this rough spot, it made me feel better to pretend we might not. So I extrapolated from there and sat down and wrote my first awkward tune, a ditty called I’m Waiting.

It wasn’t a great song and was, improbably, inspired by the name of a song that I heard on the radio (I didn’t hear the song, just the name). We played it a few times and then dropped it from the repertoire, but it got me started. It also allowed me to release some of the poison that was building up in my psyche after G stabbed me and I begaßn to see the therapeutic benefits of songwriting as well as just the ego-stroking ones.

After our first gig as a band with a name, Whitey left to crawl out of the bottle and onto the wagon and to focus his time and attention on his work as a film composer and as a member in The Lucky Stars. After playing around a bit as an acoustic duo, Matt and I both decided it was time to break out of the neo-Simon & Garfunkle niche we were slipping into and see if we could find a drummer and turn Lonesome Pie into an actual band. We did this by employing the tried and true method honed by thousands of other bands in LA, we put an ad in the Recylcler. Matt carefully worded the ad to give as accurate a view of our musical proclivities and ultimate ambitions as possible so as to weed out as many incompatible wannabes as possible. In fact, he did such a good job that nobody responded at all.