Lonesome Pie

Finally, after several weeks, Matt got a call from a drummer who’d seen the Recycler ad and was interested in meeting us and jamming and seeing how things worked out. The two of them talked for a while and then set up a couple of hours at a rehearsal studio near Matt’s house. When the appointed hour arrived, I packed my borrowed gear in the car and drove across town to meet them. I was excited and nervous and had a cold. I parked and dragged my stuff inside and met Jeff, the drummer, and his friend Adam, who came along to hang out. Matt had warned me that Jeff was older than I expected and, sure enough, he was. In his forties, he looked every bit the part of the salesman he was, but I didn’t care. I’d never played with a drummer or sang through a PA before, so even if we didn’t like each other, I figured the day would be a valuable learning experience for me.

Now I guess the traditional thing to do at points like this is to just jam and see what happens. But I was new enough to my instrument and Matt was enough of a control freak that jamming wasn’t something either of us were comfortable with. So, we taught Jeff some of our songs and helped him shape appropriate drum parts and played through a few songs like that. I tried to get used to playing with a drummer (which was remarkable easy, at least for the two of us) and tried to get used to singing through a PA (much harder and, with my head full of phlegm, much less successful). I sang atrociously and we were both pretty monomaniacal (or is that duomaniacal?) about how our songs should be played, but Jeff seemed enthusiastic about playing with us and, at the end of the session, said that if we wanted him, he was ours. He also said that he had been playing in a cover band and had a gig coming up next weekend if we wanted to check him out in action. We all shook hands and thanked each other for coming and told him we’d come check his band out or give him a call.

I was delighted, but Matt was a little nervous. He worried that Jeff might be too old and not look cool enough for the band. I convinced him that that would just make the two of us look younger and cooler and, besides, Jeff could play the drums – and play them well – and, even more importantly, he wanted to play the drums with us. Matt finally came around and we decided to go see his cover band (Supercheese), purely as a formality. They were fun and dumb and Jeff seemed pleased to see us there and we had a drink with him after the show and told him if he wanted to play with us, we’d be delighted to have him join the band. He was pleased, but needed a little time to extract himself from Supercheese, as they already had some gigs set up. We, of course, understood (we were quite gracious) and we told him we were playing another acoustic set at Anastasia’s asylum in a couple of weeks, if he wanted to come check us out. We gave him a flyer and we all shook hands and slapped each other on the back and did all those typical male bondage things that manly men do.

Our gig at Anastasia’s was scheduled for the Monday after Thanksgiving. We had a couple of British friends in town and enjoyed showing them the traditions and excesses of this most American holiday (my contention is that it is Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday, what with the obscene consumption of food, the idealized visions of family bliss that inevitably break down into the less idealized visions of endless football, the biggest consumer frenzy day of the year and the whitewashing of the genocide visited by us upon the original inhabitants of this continent all rolled into one supersized orgy and stuffed into a turkey – which was Ben Franklin’s losing nomination for national bird (Jefferson’s winning choice – the regal-looking scavenger who lives off the work of others – is a more appropriate choice, I must admit)). The weekend went well and on Sunday morning, G and I drove up to see the therapist we’d been going to for a few months, ever since our pregnancy-scare crisis. We both felt like the therapy had helped but that we were at a point where we’d like to go it alone for a while. He agreed and we drove back home in high spirits.

The next day, Monday, I dragged my tired carcass to work. By this time, I had been made the editor on the Ayn Rand film and the director and I spent the day tweaking a couple of sequences and then going over to the optical house to see how some effects were coming along. When we got back to the cutting room in the late afternoon, there was a message on the machine. I picked up the phone and pushed play, a pencil and paper at the ready. It was somebody named Sgt. Palmer, from Alaska. Could I please give him a call as soon as possible?

There are certain transitions in your life in which everything changes. Moments that will forever split your life into a before and an after. Some of these moments you can see coming, and there is usually a great deal of preparation and celebration for such events – things like graduation or marriage or childbirth. Others catch you off guard, and you become aware of the transition only after it has already happened. Like a great door slamming shut behind you, these moments thrust you unceremoniously into a strange and unfamiliar room, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The door is locked and that previous room, which is now bathed in the warm, innocent light of wistful nostalgia, is and forever shall be out of reach.

When I heard that Sgt. Palmer wanted me to call him in Alaska, what I really heard was the sound of a big, heavy oak door slamming shut behind me. I dutifully wrote the number down and numbly dialed it, but I knew what this was about. It was a scene I had practiced in my head a thousand times. I got through to him and identified myself and I could hear him slip into a cautious, sympathetic tone. He hated to be the bearer of bad news, but my father’s body had been found early that morning. In a curiously detached tone of voice, I asked him what had happened, how he had died.

“Self-inflicted gunshot,” he replied.

So, it had finally happened. After all those years of waiting, my father had finally killed himself. I called G and excused myself from work. The anger and the sadness and the fear and the relief all cancelled each other out, and I floated home, wrapped in cotton, unable to feel anything. Once home, G embraced me, and told me she had called a couple of people, including Matt, so he could cancel our show. Angrily, I called him back, and said I still wanted to play. He was surprised but, wisely, refused, saying even if I felt like it, he didn’t, and he thought I should just stay home and let the roof cave in on me. Which is, of course, one of the very reasons I wanted to get out of the house and focus on something else. Out of options, I sat in the living room and listened to the ceiling creak, waiting to feel something.

My dad had always been the consummate magician (or liar) – so good that most people never saw the sleight of hand. He was big and gruff and loud and sensitive and lovable – a giant teddy bear – and most people were more than willing to accept his Saint Nick persona at face value. That was never an option for me. Being his child, I had a natural and pathological need to know as much about him as possible, and one of the very few things I did know for certain was that he was very unhappy and that, most likely, he would reach a point in his life in which he didn’t feel he could go on by himself and, rather than asking for (or accepting) help, he would kill himself. In many ways, I had been waiting for this day for 20 years. It occurred to me while I was mulling this over that my song Waiting was going through my head. I thought I was just unconsciously rehearsing for the now-cancelled gig, but listening to the words and shifting the focus to my dad, the song took on a whole other meaning.

The plaster cracked, then exploded, and I was buried under a pile of rubble.

Needless to say that the next few days were pure hell, from the thousands of bits of business to tie up to the dozens of friends and acquaintances of my father to deal with – some sane and helpful, many more crazy and less helpful – to the hair raising plane trip out of Anchorage that was aborted due to severe mechanical failure (the closest I’ve been to a plane crash (that I know of)). Thank god for my wife and for the band. G carried me through many difficult stretches and the band offered my only real respite from the constant burden of carrying my father’s dead body around with me. When I couldn’t get together with Matt, I sat at my tape deck with my bass and obsessively rehearsed two country songs I wanted to perform, Loretta Lynn’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E and Ray Price’s Crazy Arms.

Eventually, I got used to this new, cold room that my father left me in and life settled back down to something approaching normality. Jeff had managed to extricate himself from Supercheese and was busy learning our material. On paper, Lonesome Pie made no sense whatsoever. With the possible exception of the Beatles, there was no one musical influence that we all shared. Matt came from the indie rock school, I preferred electronica, and Jeff was musically stuck back in the ‘70s. Matt and I were terrible taskmasters, microdictating Jeff’s drum parts to him. Being a fan of the overblown ‘70s, Jeff liked his drum parts with lots of frills and ornamentation while Matt and I preferred a more stripped down, basic part (my idea of the perfect drum part can be found on the Cars’ classic Just What I Needed – steady but a little quirky (especially in the glorious shifting accent in the last verse) with just the right amount of fill and crash to add flavor but not so much that it overpowers the dish). I can’t think of another musician who’d be so willing to be so micromanaged, but Jeff was a good sport and, to be honest, offered quite a few valuable suggestions.

Then there was our look. I famously don’t give a crap what I look like – I’m no slubberdegullion, but I not only don’t spend a lot of time and money and energy buying and maintaining a wardrobe, I think it’s downright evil to exert that much effort on your skin-deep beauty. Matt isn’t exactly a clothes horse, but he does spend a lot more time and energy cultivating the right look – and, consequently, had some interesting suggestions on how to improve the band’s popularity, such as I should maybe change my shoes. Jeff looked like what he was, a middle-aged salesman. In fact, at our first gig, one of our friends came up and asked, of our drummer, “so, who’s the dentist?” (Because of our irritating musical micromanagement and Jeff’s looks, Matt and I sometimes called the band Two Assholes and a Dentist.)

And finally, there was the matter of the music itself. Matt’s songs and my songs were completely different in form and content. He tended towards impenetrably obtuse lyrics set over repeating riffs of weird jazzy chords and my songs tended to be sardonic narratives over exhaustingly elaborate chord progressions (I always unconsciously tried to include every chord in all of my songs so as not to make any of them feel left out). Matt rocked harder and I was poppier. As Jeff would say, Matt was John and I was Paul, but I felt a better comparison was that he was Andy and I was Colin. Like our XTC counterparts, Matt produced the bulk of the material and it was “his” band and I contributed a few light pop confections to cleanse the palette.

The hierarchy of the band was always very clear. Matt was on top, I was second banana, and Jeff brought up the rear. But Jeff was by no means a disposable commodity. Jeff was the best musician of the three of us and really brought the songs to life with his vital and creative drumming (we used to call him The Propellor – but that’s another story). Although his instincts were often exactly the opposite of what Matt and I were looking for, he took direction extremely well and was always enthusiastic about the band and our music. Being an only child, I never knew what it was like to have a younger brother, but I can’t help but think it would be a little like having Jeff in the band. Although older than either Matt or I by almost ten years, Jeff was the least mature of the three of us. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, like he was irresponsible or pouty or didn’t pull his weight, but that he always acted younger, like he had gotten stuck in high school emotionally while his body grew into middle age. He was goofy and made me cringe sometimes with puppy dog energy and his enthusiastically fanciful pipe dreams, but he loved the band and made important contributions to the sound of Lonesome Pie. It was Jeff who suggested shifting the tempo of I Can Dream between 4/4 for the verses and 6/8 during the choruses and that really made that song work, so if he contributed nothing else, he earned his keep with that one suggestion, but the truth is he contributed a lot on every track we worked on.

Once Matt and Jeff and I had settled down as a trio and had worked through enough material to put together a reliable set, we decided it was time to hone our act in front of a live audience. And for us, as it has been for many other bands, that meant going to Al’s Bar. Al’s Bar is as close to a LA musical institution as anything else – or rather, it was, since it was just suddenly (sadly) closed down when the property shifted owners. It speaks volumes of the mentality of LA that one more of its storied institutions was unceremoniously shut down for nothing more than a financial whim. This country in general and this city in particular has zero sense of history – in fact, that’s largely what the history of the US is built on – a place where you could come to reinvent yourself and escape the oppressive weight of a thousand generations or of a strict class or caste system. LA takes this model to a hyperaccelerated extreme. Everything is bright and shiny and newly sculpted and louvered and polished. Everything in LA is a set and we’re all actors walking around, saying our lines, not existing before or after this particular moment. LA is television personified, with English Tudor mansions cozied up next to Spanish haciendas across the street from futuristic postmodern monstrosities just like channels and programming all crushed together in one contextless, meaningless mélange. The result of this (as of television) is that our cultural attention span has gotten shorter and shorter in this extreme grab for momentary satisfaction without any regard for what has come before or any concern as to what will come next. And so, like many symbols of the history of LA, like seemingly everything except Musso and Frank’s, Al’s Bar got just a little too old and got wiped out.

But while it was around, it was one of the best places to go work on your set. For starters, they were willing to take on almost any band, and you didn’t have to pay to play there. A lot of clubs in LA, especially on the much-vaunted Sunset Strip, require that you pre-sell a certain number of tickets or guarantee a certain number of people. Al’s was willing to let seemingly anybody play, no matter how small the audience that came. And one of the added bonuses to this scenario is that a lot of the bands that played Al’s truly sucked, which just made a decent band, like ours, sound that much better. Matt got us on a bill with some friends in a semi-electric set, got to know the booker, and in May of 1996, right about the time we made our first recordings, we played our first real gig as Lonesome Pie. At Al’s Bar, R.I.P.

After that, we played Al’s every couple of months or so, and it became our main place to play live. We also played semi-regularly (i.e. more than once) at Spaceland. Spaceland was, for a brief time, the unofficial center of the burgeoning Silver Lake music scene which fizzled out before it ever really exploded – sending only Beck to the realm of musical superstar before collapsing under its own hype.

As we were all sort of casual about Lonesome Pie and its potential, we didn’t gig that much. We worked on our set during our once-a-week rehearsal and Matt and I both started writing material specifically for the band and we’d play somewhere every few weeks, just to see what worked and what didn’t and to see if we could create any kind of buzz. But most of our attention was focused on writing and arranging and learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses as musicians and people. Matt and I had been friends for a while, and good friends at that, so I knew him pretty well going into the band. If anything, Lonesome Pie just strengthened our relationship, and we spent many happy evenings working on songs and singing in Matt’s acoustically exuberant kitchen. Matt was always gracious and enthusiastic about my songs and his encouragement at my fledging steps gave me confidence to keep writing material. Lonesome Pie was always Matt’s band, and everybody knew that, but Matt listened closely to what I had to say and I felt like it was a real partnership. And that was a feeling I hadn’t felt for a long time.