Lonesome Pie

I had long wanted to make the transition from editing on film to editing on a computerized non-linear editing system, but was having trouble finding a door in. When I first got to LA, I sank a bunch of money I couldn’t afford to part with learning how to cut on the Montage system, a bizarre hybrid of linear and non-linear editing systems that relied on 17 Beta decks all loaded with copies of the same tape. Right after I finished my training, the company went bankrupt and the system disappeared. There were a lot of systems fighting for dominance in this new field, but nobody had really cornered the market yet. Twice shy, I avoided learning any system until it seemed like it was becoming the standard, so I sat on the sidelines while watching systems start up and fizzle out (Edit Droid, anybody?). Finally, it seemed like the market was settling down to two choices, the Avid and the Lightworks. When Avid announced a system that would allow you to output broadcast quality video (instead of having to go to an expensive (but safe) on-line suite to finish your show), I knew they would win and I promptly signed up for a class.

Unfortunately, taking a class to learn a program as complicated and robust as Avid is almost completely useless, especially an intensive class over a weekend. There’s only so much your brain can absorb and, without regular practical applications, what little knowledge you do retain atrophies and falls out of your ears. Nevertheless, I needed to feel like I was making some progress, so I took the class so that I could at least recognize the program in action. I knew it was going to take working on it every day in a job-like situation before I really understood it, but then there I was, stuck at one of those maddening Catch-22’s (can’t get a job unless you know how to use it and can’t learn how to use it unless you get a job). Fortunately, my friend Geoff (not to be confused with the drummer Jeff), was working at a place that needed an assistant and so he brought me in and surreptitiously taught me (some of) what I needed to know. Unfortunately, because the Avid is computer-based, only one person can use the system at a time, which means that the editors and the assistants need to work staggered shifts, unlike film editing where everybody’s all together happily churning away on their little piece of celluloid. On the plus side, it meant I was mostly alone when I worked and could crank tunes and digitize footage while I was naked. On the negative side, this meant I started work at 2:00 am and went home through morning rush hour at 9:00am. I did learn the Avid, but it was grueling. I was constantly exhausted as I could never get a good day’s sleep. I did get to spend the evenings with my wife, but then she’d go to sleep and I’d have to amuse myself for two hours before it was even time to go to work. It was awful.

I was so tired that I took to smoking cigarettes again in a futile attempt to stay perky and energetic. One night, I started digitizing a tape (which means I have nothing to do for the next half hour) and grabbed my smokes and headed out to the stairwell. I sat on a step and hummed, listening to the echoes reverberated through the 25-floor concrete and steel structure. I started humming a part of (Sequence) 14 and enjoyed the way the tones overlapped each other. Then I added words and was off and running. Later, noodling around on the piano, I found an agreeable melody to some of the chords from Down in the Park that dovetailed nicely with the Synergy-inspired chorus, and I had my song structure. Time for the lyrics.

I was genuinely surprised at what words came out of my pen when I sat down to work on the lyrics. Since I had been singing the chorus as “because I’m high” so that I’d have a good long open vowel sound, I decided to write a drug song, but I thought I’d write a pro-drug song. That’s not exactly how it came out. The first verse was pretty pro-drug, but the second one turned into more of a cautionary tale. I waffled about it for a little, but since it so clearly stated the deep ambivalence I have about drugs in general (and pot in particular), I decided I should be true to that ambivalence and keep it as a song about both the allure of drugs and the dangers of relying on them too much. The song was a bitch to play live, and so we didn’t do it that often, but the recording went well and I’m pleased with the results. We played the finished version for a friend of ours who was a recovering coke head and she burst into tears, so I knew there was something good and truthful going on. Any time I can write something that makes somebody cry, I know I’m doing something right.

The recording of High also gave me the opportunity to realize a project I had been thinking about for a long time. I like collecting unusual short films and animation and ran across the work of Zbignew Rybczynski (spell that ten times fast) a few years ago and was entranced. He works in the grey area between live action and animation, painstakingly manipulating his footage optically to create elaborately choreographed filmic collages – very difficult to describe. He’s sort of the filmic version of my favorite photographer, Jerry Uelsmann. Both of them carefully and expertly create their worlds by hand, and both crafts are, unfortunately, being overrun by computers, so any idiot with a scanner and Photoshop could do in a couple of hours what it took Uelsmann years to perfect in his darkroom with his multiple enlargers and precise printing techniques. Zbignew Rybczynski works in much the same way, painstakingly planning his films and spending what must be thousands of hours printing and reprinting frames to create his unique visions. His artistry was recognized in 1982, when he won the Academy Award for his “animated” short, Tango. After he won the award, the story goes, he slipped out of the back of the auditorium to enjoy a cigarette and found himself locked out. While trying to gain re-entry, he aroused the suspicions of the security guards, who confronted and questioned him. Unable to speak very good English, he quickly found himself in custody at the local jail. Perhaps the only person in history to win an Oscar and go to jail on the same night.

Anyway, he made this wonderful film called New Book, in which a man goes out of his apartment, takes a bus across town, buys a book, and goes back home. I know, it sounds spellbinding. What made it so fascinating is that the story is told from 9 points of view – 9 cameras are set up around town and film him as he runs his errand. Each of the 9 cameras runs for the entire film and is shown at once, on a 3x3 grid on the screen. So you can follow him as he walks out of one camera’s range and appears in the next one and so on. But there’s more than just his story being told. All over town, other people are engaged in other activities, and they wander in and out of different camera’s views as the film goes on. It’s an absolutely stunning piece of work – much more impressive than it probably sounds – and I was captivated. When it came time to go into the studio to record High, I knew I could do the same thing with the song. Since the song is made up of several tracks recorded by different people at different times of the day, I figured I’d film the entire recording process, getting each person recording the take that would eventually be used in the final song. Since those takes would all eventually synch up, I could show all of each take at the same time on split screens, and you could actually see how the song was put together. After we finished recording, I took the videotapes into work and stayed up all night one night, synching takes up and putting them in small boxes on the monitor, until I had all eight takes (drums, bass, three guitars, keyboards, and two vocals) split in a 3x3 grid (with a blank center box) running for the entire song. Then I rolled each frame back a minute or so from the beginning of the song and forward a minute or so from the end of the song so you could watch (and hear) us get ready to do our takes and then react to how we had played. It was a very simple procedure and the results were very satisfying, and it is the one official music video that Lonesome Pie produced. (There’s another unofficial video that’s made from putting bits of the film Titanic to Matt’s song Out of Season, but that’s another story and I have to keep some Lonesome Pie lore a secret so future historians will have something to argue about).

At this point, things were really clicking with the band. Our recordings were going well. We were playing frequently and had started regularly making the list of recommended bands to see around town. We even, somehow, managed to get featured in Buzz Weekly as a band to see and had a very appreciative audience show up for what many consider to be one of our best performances, a gig at Al’s Bar. It was so successful that we even got a couple of bimbo groupies to approach us after the show and ask us where the party was going to be. Rock ‘n’ Roll!

By this time, G was pregnant with Owen-to-be (that’s where the party was) and I knew having a baby would drastically alter my life, so I pushed to get as much done with the band as possible before the due date. We had recorded enough material to fill out a CD and began working towards that. Matt commissioned his father, a little-known but wonderful artist whose studio Matt and I briefly rehearsed in, to paint the cover. Matt built a photo collage for the back and I set to work designing the inside. And we obsessively argued about which songs to include and what order they should be in. When all was said and done, we had a CD with a quite respectable 18 songs on it, coming in at almost an hour long.

There were several songs that didn’t make the cut, either because we didn’t like the recordings or because the songs had fallen out of favor before they made it into the studio. Most of the former were Matt’s and most of the latter were mine. My songs Waiting, Open Road, and Generica were all dropped after a few rehearsals and performances, although Standing Still (a play on the different meanings of “standing still” and “still standing” that was thematically inspired by the break-up of mutual friends and lyrically inspired by a line in an Ultravox song (We Stood Still)) made the grade – although it was buried on the second half of the album, where we sent our less popular fare, like Matt’s strident Pie. Matt axed his recordings of Why We Came (aka Ice), Some Guy, Perfect and What I Need – an early song that featured the dubious guilty pleasure of bass players (and the bane of music listeners) everywhere, the electric bass solo. We also didn’t put any cover tunes on the album, although we did a few. We only ever recorded I’m Lonesome because every other time we went into the studio, we were too anxious to record our own songs. But we also occasionally performed Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E and the classic country duet Love Hurts. Matt let me embarrass myself singing Ray Price’s Crazy Arms a couple of times in public before pulling the plug on that one. Then, of course, was the Bag’s Egg, which ended many a performance (because, really, where could you go after that?). Matt also tried to convince us to play a ZZ Top song, but he quickly regained his senses.

It was while we were preparing the album that we got one of our biggest breaks. A reviewer for the widely read local music magazine Music Connection had a cancellation and, at the last minute, dropped in to see us play at a small club in Santa Monica, 14 Below. It was completely unexpected, and we played to our usual crowd of seven, but he wrote a very favorable review, summarizing that we were “a good band with music that is definitely worth a listen”. The final paragraph of the review read “there are many good elements here, and with a little work, Lonesome Pie could be a great band”, which allowed us to pull “a great band” out as a quote and stick it on flyers. The review came out the same week we finished mastering the album (a story in itself which I will not, alas, elaborate upon) and then G went into labor and Owen was born.

And the band fell apart.