Lonesome Pie

While writing and rehearsing and gigging were important aspects of Lonesome Pie, the real treat and what we all worked hardest towards doing was recording. Because that was the one aspect of the whole enterprise that wasn’t ephemeral. That was the one thing you could hold in your hand at the end of the day. That was the proof that lasted after the lights went down and you’d burned your post-gig joint. We could jam and we could write and arrange and we could perform for small crowds in small clubs in the middle of the night during the week, but if we could make a CD, then we’d have accomplished something.

And besides, the sorry truth of the matter is that we sucked as a live band. Every recording I have of us playing live is just embarrassingly dreadful. Part of that is because we were always at the mercy of the sound guy, who never knew who to feature when, so harmony vocals come out twice as loud as lead vocals and there’s too much bass and not enough guitar or whatever. But beyond that, we just weren’t that exciting. We weren’t outrageous and we didn’t have great stage presence or witty banter. We didn’t have star quality. We’d just play our songs and go sit down. I was always nervous playing and singing before an audience, and my fear would paralyze me. I wasn’t afraid of singing or playing the wrong thing, although perhaps I should’ve been, but I was afraid to move around too much and get funky with my bass playing in case I wasn’t playing that well and didn’t know it. Nothing worse than some dorky white guy getting down with his bad self while grooving way off the beat. It’s what I’ve heard called “white overbite”, the unfortunate tendency honkeys have of biting their lips while they dance because they think they’re so funky while everybody whose really got soul laughs their asses of at their pathetic gyrations. I was afraid of doing too much body rocking in case I wasn’t right on the beat, so I stood still and quietly played to my shoes. It’s too bad we weren’t around about ten years earlier, when that style of playing was actually big enough that shoegazing was a distinct genre. Matt had more stage presence, but he could be counted on to forget some lyrics or brick a guitar solo at least once a show. Since live shows weren’t our forte, we really looked forward to going into the studio. Matt began casting around for a cheap producer, found some local guy that had just recorded an album for well-regarded indie label Matador in his newly completed studio, and wanted to try to record somebody else. He was a friend of somebody Matt met once at a party or something but, most importantly, he was cheap because he didn’t know what the hell he was doing – which was just what we were looking for, because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing either, So, in April, a week shy of Matt’s 30th birthday, the three of us met for breakfast early on a Saturday morning and then gathered our gear together and went to meet our George Martin.

Ward had been a professional musician for a long time, and had found some local celebrity as a guitarist in the LA punk outfit The Gun Club and, later, with the Pontiac Brothers. After the demise of both of those groups, he formed his own one-man unit called Liquor Giants and had just finished recording his second album in his newly completed upstairs recording studio. He’s one of those irritating multi-instrumentalists who play everything on their albums (a la Johnny Polonsky) and then hires a band when it comes time to tour. Although unknown here (and tragically snubbed in the recent three-disc set of Matador bands), he, like Abba, is apparently huge in Australia. Go figure.

A tall, lanky California native with a bitterly ironic sense of humor, he welcomed us into the Silver Lake house he was busy renovating and played us the opening track from his latest album so we could see what kind of sound he could get out of his 12-track board. Chocolate Clown sounded great but, frankly, if it had been at all audible, we would’ve been happy as we were there more to see what it would be like to record and if we got anything useful out of the sessions, that would just be frosting on the cake.

We sent Jeff upstairs set up his drums and Matt and I stayed downstairs with Ward and listened to his war stories and heard a couple of the sonic rarities that he had picked up throughout his career – my personal favorites being Cheech and Chong’s greatest hits as performed by two other guys and the insanely sparse instrumental backing track to my favorite Beach Boys song, I Get Around (Ward was particularly fond of the Beach Boys and was well versed on all the twists and turns of the tragic story of Brian Wilson).

The recording itself went about as you would expect with a room full of guys who had no idea what they were doing. The attic studio was punishingly hot, causing the mixing board to overheat and shut down every half-hour or so during the afternoon. Also, Ward, for his great sense of humor, was edgy and stressed and depressed and didn’t exactly put everybody at ease. He was a better musician than any of us would ever be and I got the sense that it was hard for him to hear us flog away at our instruments in such an amateurish way. He quickly found our weaknesses and made relentless fun of us (Jeff was stupid and I was a bad musician who couldn’t sing and Matt’s songs weren’t quite right). Plus, at least for that first weekend, he was a mess. He was really hung-over on our second day, when it came time to do vocals and mix the tracks, and at one point he actually passed out during one of Matt’s vocal takes and we had to tiptoe around and whisper critiques and instructions so as not to wake him up – like that wonderful board meeting early in Local Hero.

Although we weren’t thrilled with any of the recordings, the experience had whet our appetite and in May of 1996, older and wiser, we went back to Ward’s for a long weekend and recorded six more songs. This time, in addition to recording four of Matt’s songs – Blinded, What I Need, Some Guy, and Pie (from whence came our name), we got to do two of mine, the epic Gun and the histrionic I Can Dream.

Gun, the longest song in our repertoire, was inspired by the beginning of the little known Severed Heads’ track Mad Dad Mangles a Strad grafted onto the opening of Caroline Lavelle’s Turning Ground. It is also one of the only songs I wrote on the bass, and is unlike my piano-based writing because of that (in some other life, I’ll learn how to play guitar so I can get that perspective to song writing as well). Gun was always well received, but can be an endless slog if it’s not going well. After playing through it for the first time, Jeff wiped his brow and said, “what a mind-fuck”. I was having trouble writing the last verse and asked G what other situation powerless people try to use guns to change and she said (duh) suicide. You’d’ve thought that’d be right on the top of my list of gun issues, since my father had killed himself with one a few weeks before that, but I was apparently writing the song unconsciously, so it took me by surprise. Once I realized that’s what the song was attempting to deal with, I spit out the last verse with hardly any problems.

This time around, both Ward and his studio were in better shape. He was still snide and cynical, but he seemed a little more settled (and a lot more conscious) and we were more confident as a band. But he really redeemed himself with me when we recorded one of my songs, I Can Dream. I had written the song on the piano and then transposed it from C to E when I brought it to the band to make it easier to play and sing. Halfway through the recording session, it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to have to play the organ chords in the middle in the dreaded key of E, and I had no idea how to do that, so I ran downstairs while Matt recorded his guitar part and quickly tried to figure it out on the piano. Being a pretty poor pianist, the key of E was always one I tried to avoid (like B), but after half-an-hour, I figured it out and ran back upstairs to record it. It took a few takes to get into it, and then I did one perfectly except for the last chord, which was some god-awful angular dissonant cluster. I grinned sheepishly and Ward threatened to kill me. He wound the tape back and tried it once more and this time, I got all the chords right, but screwed up the rhythm slightly. Fortunately, we all agreed that that little flub made it sound endearingly amateurish (rationalization knows no bounds) and we decided to keep it.

Then it was time to do my vocals, and I was terrified. Very unsure of my voice, I found it humiliating to stand in that small space with three guys watching and listening to me sing, especially because the rest of the mix was only coming through my headphones and all they could hear was me belting out my pathetic ballad a capela. Ward wound the tape to the top, got a level, and started recording. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and went for it. When it was over, and I shakily opened my eyes, I could see Ward hunched over the mixing board, crying. It wasn’t my singing that had affected him so strongly (good or bad), but the musical and lyrical content of the song, and in that moment, all the bitterness and distancing irony fell away. He was a fellow musician, and he had been touched by music that I had written. Despite his protective exterior, he paid me the ultimate compliment by letting me see how strongly something I had written had affected him, and I shall always be grateful to him for that – especially as that was one of the first songs I had ever written. That moment was a wonderful acknowledgement, and gave me a great deal of courage to continue with the band. And for that, I thank you, Ward.

Because we all knew more coming in, these recordings came out better – although it was clear that Gun needed more than Ward could offer. After listening to them exhaustively, we pressed Jeff’s friend Adam into service burning a couple of CDs for us and we sent them to a few local radio stations. A few weeks later, I was at home and in a foul mood. I was stomping around the house moping and grumbling and I suddenly decided that I needed to go out to Kinkos to copy a few things and to get out of the house for a few minutes. I jumped in the car and turned on the radio. The dial was set to KCRW, as usual, and Merle Haggard was singing about the fightin’ side of him. I turned into Kinko’s parking lot as Merle hit his last chord, and then the hair shot up on my arm as I heard a too-familiar guitar lick. DJ Liza Richardson was playing our demo of Blinded for all the world to hear. I couldn’t believe it. I parked the car and sat, stupefied, listening to Blinded coming across the airwaves. I was wriggling and giggling with joy and wanted to jump out of the car and yell to passers-by “I’m on the radio! I’m on the radio!” As soon as the song was over, I ran home and called Matt. Liza played our song and she said our name and we were just on the radio and oh my god that’s so fucking cool we were between Merle and Café Tecuba rock ‘n’ roll! We babbled at each other for a few minutes, feeling like big swinging dicks, and then hung up to each privately contemplate the staggering implications of our new found success.

The next morning, Monday, I had the day off and was listening to the flagship show of KCRW, the Chris Douridas-hosted Morning Becomes Eclectic. Matt called and said he had called in requesting Blinded only to discover that Douridas already had it out and was set to play it. I jumped up and grabbed a tape and pressed record while Coleman Hawkins unfurled his Blues Wail. And there, again, like liquid lightning, were the opening chords of Blinded. I listened delightedly. The song faded out and Chris’ boyish voice came on, “That’s a Los Angeles ensemble – a trio actually, featuring Matt Bosson and Christopher Earl and Jeff Breitman. They call themselves Lonesome Pie (exaggerated enunciation) and the EP is...same name. Lonesome Pie from Bossonova Music. They are based here in Los Angeles and these are pretty much demos. We heard Blinded. That was by request from Lonesome Pie. Followed one from Coleman Hawkins called Blues Wail...”

I figured that was it. I’d died and was on my way to pop heaven. On Monday, January 6, 1997, Chris Douridas said my name on the air during Morning Becomes Eclectic. How much better could it get?