Lonesome Pie

As our repertoire grew and as we became more comfortable with each other, we did something I never thought I’d be a party to. We jammed. I had tried jamming before in a couple of different scenarios with a couple of different people, but it had never amounted to anything. I wasn’t a good enough musician and could never find enough common ground to just start playing along with somebody else. But playing together every week and absorbing each others style starting having a long term effect and one Saturday, out of nowhere, we started jamming. It was an absolutely exhilarating experience, and one I hadn’t been party to in many years. There was a time when I was studying dance in high school that I was so connected with my best friend Eric that I felt like we were two parts of the same person. That was brought home powerfully during dance tour one year.

Each year, in the spring, the Interlochen Arts Academy dance department would go on a week-long tour around the state of Michigan and perform concerts and give lecture/demonstrations at various schools and local performance spaces. These tours were a blast and we always came back to school exhausted and full of stories about the strange host families we stayed with and the unusual conditions under which we performed. It was, again, a strengthening experience, something that really built a sense of community among the dancers, and we looked forward to it eagerly.

One year, my best friend Eric and I and my first girlfriend-to-be Tina and the unrequited object of my desires, Jill, were recruited by my mom, the ballet teacher, to perform in her new piece. It was based on an unusual piece by a little-known composer named Serocki (as opposed to Sir Bullwinkle, we liked to joke) that combined a lot of the sound experimentation that was popular among contemporary classical music elite (inspired by the likes of John Cage) with a steady classic jazz high-hat shuffle beat. The steady pulsing beat was passed around among the musicians in the small chamber group who played their instruments in a number of unorthodox ways – plucking the piano strings or rubbing them with a toothbrush, playing the clarinet without the mouthpiece or playing just the mouthpiece and the like. It was a great piece of music and, inspired, my mom called the four of us to the dance building one night after dinner to begin working on a dance piece.

It was one of the most electrifying and excitingly creative nights of my life. My mom usually had most of the choreography worked out in advance before bringing in the dancers and we would sometimes help her fill in little holes. But tonight she had almost nothing planned. The five of us locked into an amazing groove and came up with a seemingly endless supply of interesting movements and partnering ideas. Although it was never articulated as such, the piece was based loosely on the idea of sex and the four of us dancers, being hormone blasted adolescents, warmed up to the task immediately. We spent hours feverishly dancing and choreographing and even got special dispensation to stay out past 10:00 pm sign-in to finish the piece. There was a wonderful sense of shared vision and camaraderie – it was a glorious experience.

The finished piece was performed as a double duet (pas-de-deux, to use le mot just) in which the two couples performed the same steps at the same time. It was a precision piece and its success depended largely on our ability to stay perfectly synchronized. The more we performed it, the tighter it became, and it grew into fruition on tour, when we were performing it every day – sometimes twice a day. But there was a problem. The fact that the dance was abstracted sex was not lost on the audiences – which were largely made up of horny high-school students. And the fact that the two women were gorgeous and wore skin-tight costumes only added fuel to the fire. To make matters worse, the piece of music was so abstract that there were few definite landmarks along the way and if you didn’t start the piece together right at the very beginning, there was little chance you’d find your way through it. Plus, the piece of music started off extremely quietly with the lights coming up on the two nearly naked nubile ballerinas. This always got a huge roar of appreciation from the audience and probably sparked more than a little adolescent interest in ballet. But, we’d inevitably miss the crucial beginning of the music to the lusty roar of the audience and would then be set adrift on the sea of musical chaos that made up the piece. But a peculiar thing started happening between Eric and me. We started being able to read each other’s mind. In order for the piece (called Opus 26) to be a success, we had to stay absolutely synchronized. Tina and Jill were at our mercies as we were partnering them and the task of locking together fell squarely on Eric and my shoulders. Because we’d miss the beginning of the piece of music so often, we’d inevitably find ourselves out on stage having to spontaneously edit the movements to catch up to some important musical landmark. And without fail, Eric and I would chose to cut the same thing out at the same time – without being able to communicate with each other before hand. It was an exhilarating connection.

And that’s what happened this one Saturday with the three of us in Lonesome Pie. Matt started playing a riff; I looked at his hands to see what chords he was playing and started playing along and then Jeff grabbed his sticks and locked us all together. We hit key changes together, opened up room for solos, and stayed perfectly tuned to each other for several minutes. It was in that one moment that I suddenly understood the appeal of jazz and the blues. They were forms of music that I didn’t have much patience for listening to – but I could suddenly see how exhilarating it could be to play together with other musicians and to communicate solely through your instrument. And the familiar backbone of twelve bar blues that gets so boring to listen to becomes a wonderful anchor point to jamming musicians. We were all glowing with excitement when the jam was over and all of us knew, I think, that we had reached a new point as a band. That week, I wrote some words to what we had played and the jam became Neatness Counts, one of our more popular tunes.

Neatness Counts was one definite turning point in the band, and so was Leslie’s More. Matt had a girlfriend when we were living together in Brooklyn, and the two of them moved out to LA together shortly before G and I made the trek. EV was chronically hip, large-breasted, and mean to Matt – three prerequisites for one of his girlfriends. But she was, in my opinion, too mean (and too hip, too). She regularly made fun of and squelched his musical ambitions. In all the time we lived together, I didn’t know Matt harbored band fantasies and rarely if ever heard him play his guitar. After their difficult and painful break-up (is there another kind?), Matt uncovered his musical seeds and planted them again, leading to the formation of Lonesome Pie. Then, on a trip back east to visit his folks, he ran into an old friend from high school named Leslie. They immediately hit it off and started a torrid and difficult long-distance affair (is there another kind?). Leslie, though hip and large-breasted and mean, wasn’t too hip, and, more importantly, wasn’t too mean. She made fun of Matt like all his friends do (hey, what’re friends for?), but she did it gently, and she strongly supported his musical ambitions and ideals, nurturing his seedlings and helping them to grow. This was made abundantly clear by Matt’s first “almost entirely uncynical love song” (his words for it), Leslie’s More, one of my favorite songs of his. I had tried writing love songs a couple of times, but they always came out maudlin and embarrassingly syrupy, so I had to abandon them. Leslie’s More, by contrast, is bright and poppy and clever and catchy, but is, nevertheless, unmistakably a love song. It’s also got a great structure, dropping beats going into and out of the chorus. While they were still telecommuting, Leslie came out to visit once, and Matt nervously brought her into the rehearsal studio to listen to us practice and we played Leslie’s More for her. I don’t know if she had heard him play it before, but it was a magical moment. She absolutely glowed, oozing love and admiration, while Matt sang to his shoes, occasionally glancing in her direction. After much discussion and negotiation, she decided to move to LA to be with him and they ended up getting married and are now the proud parents of two cats.

By this time, Lonesome Pie had become my refuge, my solace, my home away from home. I love music with a deep, unquenchable passion, and to be involved in its creation was extremely satisfying. When things were going well in the band, it was a magical experience. The sizzling synergy that occurred when all three of us were locked in a groove was intoxicating and addictive. Singing harmony with Matt was an exciting and intimate experience, and made us better friends. I began holding our Saturday afternoon rehearsals sacred, and using them to drag myself through bad weeks at work. We rehearsed every week in the same room at the same rehearsal space, and it quickly came to feel like “our” room. A small, square room with stained carpeting, a beat-up PA, threadbare couch, and a freezer door to keep sound out, it wasn’t much, but it was ours. Occasionally somebody moderately famous was said to be there, working on their set, but I never saw them. I did, however, see some of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s gear stacked up in the hallway – including a giant gong, and I heard during one rehearsal that Bob Dylan was in the building, so I yelled “Bob Dylan sucks!” frequently into the microphone, just in case he could hear it.

It wasn’t long before we were ready to go back into the studio and record some more tracks, but by this time, we had outgrown Ward and his attic, so we started looking around town for another, more professional place to record. While looking through a local music magazine, I chanced upon an ad for a studio called Art of Noise and couldn’t resist the name, so I called them up. Art of Noise was run by this guy Eric who had recently moved to LA from New York and was trying to get established as an engineer and producer. It was fortuitous timing for us because he was hungry and looking for work and so his prices were pretty low for what he was offering. We chatted a bit about the band and the kind of music we played and what sort of set-up was required and then pooled our resources and rented Eric and his wares for a weekend.

Ever since I bought my first album, Synergy’s transcendent, life-changing Sequencer, I had fetishized the recording studio. The back of Sequencer featured lots of small detail photos of recording equipment and lights and dials and arcane pieces of equipment and, being a budding technodweeb, I was fascinated. The look of those early synthesizers was almost as fascinating to me as the sound that came out of them – all those patch cords and knobs and sliders and so on. So I was thrilled to finally, twenty years later, be going into a real recording studio filled with real microphones and effects boxes and compressors and sweeteners and god knows what all.

We wanted to start off modestly, since we weren’t sure how long everything would take, and so we slated two songs for the sessions, Matt’s Toasted and my Small. Small appeared like magic in my head one morning while I was cutting this dreadful Showtime series in which these chronically stupid bimbos’ tops kept flying off – believe me, it’s much worse to work on something like this than it sounds. I was digitizing away, staring blankly at the jiggling flesh, and started humming this catchy little tune. It unfolded in my head and when I hit the chorus, “I wanna be small” came leaping out of my mouth. By the time I had digitized a couple more tapes, I had written the whole thing out in my head. I had originally heard it as a reggae song (and still think it would work just fine like that), but Matt convinced me to give it a more loping, country feel in rehearsal, and it stuck. Like many of my songs (High, I Can Dream, Gun), Small is about wistful longings and feelings of lost opportunities, but it’s a cheerful, happy kind of misery, and turned out to be one of my more popular tunes.

Both Small and Toasted, one of Matt’s pothead songs, are modest songs that don’t require a lot of production or overdubs, so they seemed like perfect candidates for our first session in a “real” studio. Eric greeted us at the door of his small converted house in West Hollywood and got to work helping us set up. He was efficient and professional, but easy going at the same time and quickly made us comfortable. A real New Yorker, Eric was a die-hard Yankees fan and the kind of affably weasely guy you often ran into in the city who knew how to get around and had plenty of street smarts. With his baseball cap and his chain-smoking, he hadn’t yet been assimilated fully into LA, and he cracked me up with his rant against the LA way of pronouncing “promenade”. Which, I might point out, is the correct (that is to say, French) way of pronouncing it. But still, it irked him that we referred to the Third Street Promenade with a short A at the end (my wife and I had started to just refer to it as “The Nod”) instead of a long A sound, like the step the square dance caller yells out for you and your partner to perform. “You don’t drink lemon-odd, do you?” he said. But from that point on, we certainly did. In fact, because of his complaint, we would regularly take breaks to run to the bathroom to “urine-odd”.

Jeff set up his drums and he and Eric spent about an hour tuning them and tweaking the mics and getting everything just right while Matt and I discussed the day’s strategy. When they were ready, he and I plugged in, and the three of us played for a few minutes to warm up and we were ready to go.

As is customary in multi-track recording situations, on the first pass, Eric recorded only the drums and the bass, although Matt played along so we could get in the right groove and not get lost in the song. It’s an odd process, recording a song like this, because the band doesn’t actually play together. Each piece of a song – each atom – is carefully and methodically placed next to each other, and all the tracks have to be recorded in a relative vacuum for maximum flexibility when it comes to mixing. But it’s a very unnatural way for a group of musicians to play and takes some getting used to. Fortunately, at rehearsal the weekend before I had the idea to play through the two songs without singing, since I knew that’s how it would be recorded, and it really helped us focus and listen to each other and figure out how to feel the changes coming without the crutch of lyrics. But we were worried about being able to stay in synch over different takes played at different times of the day, so we asked Eric for a click track to anchor Small. In retrospect, I wish we hadn’t done that because it makes the song a little too regimented and doesn’t let it breathe and relax, but we didn’t yet trust ourselves to stay in synch without actually playing together. We ran through the two tracks a couple of times until we all agreed we had a good drum take of each, and then took a break to pull the drum kit apart – and smoke the first pot of the day.

Lonesome Pie is, was, and always shall be a stoner band, but we had to be careful with Jeff. Smoking pot made all of us stupider (but happier), but since Jeff had less to work with than me and Matt, getting him high could push him into dangerously dysfunctional stupidity and wreck havoc on his ability to play. So we made sure we got what we needed from him before blowing his brains out. Then we listened back to the parts I had recorded with Jeff to see if I needed to redo anything.

Fortunately, the tracks I had laid down were pretty good – we could record both of us simultaneously because I was going straight to the board and wouldn’t bleed onto Jeff’s tracks (and vice versa) – so I punched in to cover a couple of gooey notes and I was done in half-an-hour.

We had lunch (Astro Burger) and then Matt spent the rest of the day laying down his various guitar parts. They were pretty simple and straightforward for both these tracks and, after careful consideration in the control room, we all agreed we had done a good day’s work and packed it up for the night.

The next morning we knocked off the vocals (I always sing better in the morning anyway), and spent the rest of the day mixing. Jeff’s hypercritical nature bloomed in the mixing stage as he fretted about the sound of his drums. Frankly, everything was so exciting and sounded so good to me that I didn’t care, but we let him fuss for a while before pulling the plug and moving on. Left to his own devices, Jeff could fritter the entire day away tweaking the sound of his kick drum, and we had to just move on or risk drowning in minutiae. By the end of the weekend, we each had a tape of the two tracks mixed down that we could listen to obsessively in our cars.

The whole process was almost unbearably exciting. Being in a studio, watching Eric scurry around his equipment, feeling important, listening to playback. And then standing in the vocal booth with this giant, intimidatingly expensive condenser microphone on a boom, clutching my headphones just like I’d seen Frank Sinatra and ‘Retha Franklin do in pictures. It was glorious and worth every penny even if the recordings were crap. But the best treat of all was that we sounded good – much better than I had hoped. The songs were clean and crisp, we sounded tight but comfortable, and Eric did a great job shining our sound up.