Lonesome Pie

That weekend touched off a small flurry of recording. A couple of weeks after that, we brought our gear over to Whitey’s house – he and Matt had both found different places to live shortly after the party that named the band. Whitey had a modest recording set-up – more along the lines of Ward and his attic than Eric and his artful noise – but he wanted to try to record us and there were a few tracks he could play on (he’d very occasionally sit in with us live with his mandolin and accordion (Whitey was famous around town for his patented one-handed accordion playing (“chords, shmords” (hey, a quadruple parenthesis!)))). Plus, he was free. So we chose three songs that he could help us fill out musically and that didn’t require a ton of overdubs. The first song we tackled was Gas Tank, because Matt was unhappy with the recording we had made at Ward’s. For its seeming simplicity, Gas Tank was a bitch to record. For one thing, Matt had set a tempo that I still think is too slow, which made the song blossom out to almost five minutes. And the parts for all of us were so slow and so deliberate that it was almost impossible to get all the way through the song without bobbling a note. In other songs, if I didn’t play a note exactly right, there’d be another one coming right up to take its place. But the lonely whole notes of Gas Tank offered no hiding place – play a note wrong or a wrong note and you were stuck with it for a long time. We spent most of the day getting the basic tracks for that one recorded. Fortunately, we were able to nail the basics for the other two pretty quickly. The first of these was the song Matt had used to teach me how to sing harmony, the obscure rockabilly song I’m Lonesome that Matt had slowed down and countrified. And the last track was an instrumental that Matt and Whitey and I wrote together in half-an-hour back when we were still playing together. My writing credit was a bit of a sham on that track – called Burnt Coffee – because I was still so new to the bass that I couldn’t even identify the notes I was playing, but they were nice enough to take my suggestion to “um, how about if we go, er, up at this point?” as songwriting and I was happy to take credit I didn’t deserve. The tracks came out well – I even managed to get through the stratospheric singing of I’m Lonesome without humiliating myself – even though Matt did spontaneously change the lyrics when he recorded his vocals, a quirk that would haunt us every time we tried to sing I’m Lonesome together after that.

A few days after that, Matt came over to my house and the two of us dragged my old, weathered four track out of the closet and quickly recorded four acoustic songs: Nice, a track of Matt’s I had never heard before about the problem of complaining to somebody who’s always so irritatingly nice, Stay, an early vocal harmony work-out that Matt dropped early in our career (along with his ode to OJ Simpson’s daughter Arnell, whom he had once met. He dropped it after the whole trial debacle and it became a running joke in the band after that. Whenever we’d be considering what we should play next, I’d pipe up with, “how about Arnell?” and hilarity would inevitably ensue). We also recorded a love song of his called Love Ring, which he would later dust off and perform at a wedding (and quite a fitting song for that venue, I must say) and we took a stab at Styrofoam Veil, another one of Matt’s stoner songs that we’d go on to rerecord at Eric’s studio later.

Emboldened and excited, we booked The Art of Noise studio again two weeks later to tackle our two biggest and most complicated tracks, the epic Gun and the massive Attitude Problem.

Matt’s Attitude Problem was probably the oldest song of his that we played, having been written when he was in college. Inspired in no small part by his love of the extremely obscure band The Bags, which Matt idolized, Attitude Problem was a giant, heavy-metal influenced sludge fest, and I mean that in a good way. In fact, one of the members of The Bags came up to Matt after one of his Beatrice shows and specifically complimented him on that song, an event which still makes Matt smile to talk about. We did our small part to keep the Bags alive by playing one of their songs – the glorious Egg – as an encore (and people would inevitably come up to us after a show and say “hey you guys are pretty good – I especially liked that last song”).

Matt, correctly, treated the recording studio as the last stage of songwriting and would frequently come in with ideas for lots of little parts and flourishes that we couldn’t play live. Angular guitar licks would suddenly start sprouting all over a song once we got into the studio. Being the bass player, I didn’t have much to contribute in this department, although I did take the opportunity to add a few keyboard parts here and there, just because I could. Jeff would also push for lots of percussion overdubs (he was always ready with his egg shakers and tambourines and was always trying to make sure Eric left enough tracks open for his elaborately conceived multi-tracked hand-clapping section), but Matt was the real orchestrator when it came to recording sessions. It was always a treat to hear what surprises he’d been cooking up on his own, and many songs were quite different in their recorded form than in their live form. Which I whole-heartedly endorse. Attitude Problem was one such song that got the full treatment. Matt had a million ideas for guitar parts to fill out the extended end section, which I expected, but I had never considered the possibility that Attitude Problem would feature a recorder solo – something Matt would definitely have trouble pulling off live while playing the guitar. But it gave the track just the right kind of Hobbit-rock, early weird Black Sabbath running-around-in-the-woods-in-strange-glowing-costumes feel that really makes it work.

And Gun is just plain huge, with its bloated structure and overlapped vocal lines and snatches from other songs (thank you Carpenters and Mary Tyler Moore). But we were focused and energetic and, I think, did an admirable job wrestling those two beasts to the floor and sticking them on to tape.

One day at rehearsal, Jeff announced he had a song for the band. Matt and I were wary – being the control freaks that we are – but we encouraged him to teach it to us. Jeff nervously sang some hysterical lyrics about going on a date and hoping to get it on afterwards. It was called Out of the Way, and I liked it right away. Jeff’s concept for the structure was a little strange, so Matt and I tweaked it a little and found some appropriate chords to play. We all agreed it needed a kind of poppy punky beach party vibe and after playing through it a couple of times, we had it down. Jeff was briefly disappointed that what we ended up with wasn’t what he had heard in his head – something I often experienced by the time we got through arranging one of my songs – but he warmed quickly to what it had become, the only song we all claimed co-authorship of.

After a few months to save up, we were back at Eric’s to record Pay the Rent (which we called Not Rent so it wouldn’t be confused with the musical (like that was going to happen)) and to rerecord Styrofoam Veil and my just say no song, High, which is my choice for representative Lonesome Pie track. First of all, I must confess that there probably is no such thing as a Lonesome Pie sound, and no one song that could encapsulate it. Stylistically, we were all over the map, which may or may not have contributed to our spectacular lack of success. But High’s a song that I wrote that Matt sings, so it’s already quite democratic. And though Small and Gun are probably my most popular songs, High is my favorite. A weird hybrid between Gary Numan’s Down in the Park (for the verse) and Synergy’s (Sequence) 14 (for the chorus), High was written at four in the morning in a stairwell in an empty office building on LA’s Miracle Mile.