The other day I got some bad news from a friend of mine who designs typefaces. He checks his font sales religiously, and for years rarely went a day without at least one order. But, he told me, the day the stock market kamikazed, business stopped - instantly. And it's been silent ever since. Other friends with online stores have told me similar stories.
Eschatone receives sales figures from its distributors at the end of each month, so no word yet on results at retail, but I can tell you that after a very encouraging launch, the proprietary eschatone.com online store has only received two orders since the crash (both for Brian Dewan CDs). Things screeched to a startling and scary halt.
The company has virtually no overhead, so it's not like we're in any trouble, but releasing product into this environment is an empty gesture. Our priority since the summer has been Michael Bassett's Soft Verges, which is a fuckin sonic masterpiece of the highest order. But right now, promoting the record the way we want to would be like yelling into a hole in the ground - it is simply not going to stimulate sales. No slight to the record at all; sad fact is that nobody is spending money on anything not absolutely essential.
Similarly, putting out my own stuff seems like a waste of time until things improve, regardless of how much I've got stockpiled. Promoting a record is the most expensive part of a plan that ends with strangers who might be touched by the music having a chance to interact with it as its creator intended*. My music comes in a physical package of my conception and is meant to be consumed in hi-fi with all the trimmings (the same could be said for all Eschatone releases, which is why we have the roster of artists we do). That is just not gonna happen right now - people will grab for free MP3s all day, sure, but that's half the story at a fraction of the fidelity. When I listen to the finals of "The Bowery Electric" and Shoot The Piano Player on MySpace, I kinda want to throw up. These are exquisite-sounding recordings being squeezed out the nasty ass of that fucking Flash player, with a tiny little jpeg where the album sleeve should be.
Common sense says Eschatone should stay in a holding pattern right now. I'm impatient and a bit frustrated - particularly regarding Michael's record, which I feel so strongly about, I'd go door-to-door for it - but when things are better, we'll still be around and ready to go. I have a feeling that's more than we'll be able to say for much of the remaining "music business".
*That's the Eschatone model**, anyway - the average label's plan ends with them turning a profit, preferably an enormous one, which is why most of them don't last very long.
**Not to be confused with my own model, which ends with me giving copies to the same ten friends who have been listening to my shit since 1991, then driving around to it in a car until I get tired of it and want to make something else. Anything beyond that is, in my opinion, me being way too generous to the human race by giving it an opportunity to enjoy my hard-won music that it frankly doesn't deserve.
It's been a week and I think we're doing okay with this whole move to Brooklyn. We still have almost no furniture, nothing much to cook with, and no cable or Internet in the loft for two more days. But the neighborhood is wonderful, and so inspiring.
I've started just about every day by taking a bagel and coffee down to the waterfront. I have yet to see more than three or four people walk by during my breakfast. That's my favorite thing about DUMBO so far - no people!
In honor of my new homeland, I'd like to share with you my 10 most favoritest lyrics from the patron saint of Brooklyn, Brian Dewan:
1. I picked you up at your doorstep / And drove along / And drove along / And dropped you off at the loony bin / Where you belong. - "Where They Belong"
2. The letter fell into the hands of a Yankee antique dealer / He decided it was bunk and threw it in the cellar. / He bid at an auction for a haunted pianola / When he got it home, the ghost inside haunted his house forever. - "The Letter"
3. What strange abomination holds fancy over fact? / What byzantine mutation would love what can't love back? / What kind of freak of nature forgives a heinous crime? - "The Human Heart"
4. It can drum its fingers on a desk / Or shake your hand! / Or shake your hand! - "The Boston Arm"
5. Put your money where your mouth is. / Put your money in your mouth. - "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is"
6. What are you, queer? / Cut your hair. / I think you should be / In the electric chair. - "Cut Your Hair"
7. Discoloring and decaying / They cannot pull their weight / They block the path of passers-by / Until they desiccate. - "Cadavers"
8. Warm and wet and knowing / Mute, but so alive / Few of God's creations / Scarcely can compare / Who can explain / The mysteries inside / Oh, so beautiful / Slippery and smooth. - "Feel the Brain"
9. A sunny afternoon in the summertime / Sound can carry for far and wide / When I put the record on the record player to play / People can hear it for a mile away / Open all the windows on a summer's day / Hundreds of people can hear the record play. - "The Record"
10. The kids / The kids / They think they own the place / Barging in to make themselves at home / In their bathing suits / With their great big towels / Creeping forward to usurp your throne. - "The Kids"
I was so proud to vote in this election. I feel like I participated in a revolution, a real, bloodless and civilized revolution, and I feel like America's founding fathers would be proud: we used the system they created to save this country.
This should be a time for thinking hopeful thoughts of brotherhood and unity. But you know what? After eight years of having my hometown and way of life judged and slandered by the half of the country whose ignorance bought us the mess we're in, I think we Class of '04 Blue Staters are entitled to pause, take a deep breath - and rub it in a little. Just a little, before we get to work fixing the country these fuckers were telling us we could leave four years ago. Good thing for them we liberal elitists stuck around, no?
So briefly, before I get my goodwill on: I would like to invite any folks who aren't interested in supporting our new Commander-in-Chief to hike your unpatriotic asses on outta this great country. I can even suggest a fine new homeland. Since so many of you seem to think she's competent and/or hot, you might want to follow Sarah Palin back to Alaska. There's plenty of available land as nobody lives there - and lots of oil to drill, baby, drill. Best of all, Russia is right next door, so you can go buckwild with that whole hate-and-fear jam ya dig so very much. It'd be like that southwestern border-patrol-militia dress-up thing you guys love, except with an enemy who might actually be dangerous.
Once you've all relocated, you can join your favorite dude Todd Palin in the Alaskan Independence Party and secede. Don't worry, the lower forty-eight will get by (I mean, Git-R-Done) without you.
Okay, I feel better! You'll hear no more such vitriol from me, except maybe on my forthcoming album Everyone Who Voted For Bush STILL Owes The Rest Of Us Unlimited Blowjobs Forever. In the meantime - like Lee Greenwood says - I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. Because apparently "being an American" is a place. Speak English or die!
I just ate my last breakfast as a resident of the Lower East Side. Almost seven years ago to the day, I wrote this in my blog:
Monday, November 05, 2001 3:11 PM
Here
I now live in Manhattan. Everything is different.
For starters, I have no fingerprints. They seem to have rubbed off after a day of throwing furniture and heavy boxes around. My hands - or whatever's left of them - are bright red.
I woke up this morning at 8:00 as usual. 8am used to be necessary for getting in to work on time. Now it's too early. There used to be an hour-plus commute from the J train to the E train to the F train. Now it's five stops on the F and I'm here.
So instead of losing an hour of my life in transit, I built a wardrobe cabinet. I fixed a shelf. I unpacked some boxes and set up my stereo.
Time is the most precious commodity we have. I feel richer today.
The other night I went to a party in Chinatown - a charity event. I sat at a table with a handful of gen-u-wine Lower East Side legends and thought about how rich and wonderful my experience in their neighborhood has been. But it's time to go. This place is not the same as it was even when I got here, and that was already long after the fact.
I'm moving now to a quieter and crisper place: the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. There I will have the privilege of looking out the window and seeing two bridges and the entirety of New York City.
I feel like I did just about everything you can do in Manhattan, and I'm comfortable moving on. Most people can't even say that about their little hometowns, much less the greatest and toughest city in the world. I love this place so much; I'm happy that now I'll get to live with all of it at once, never changing, just shining in my window.
I got this voicemail from Arturo Vega in the spring of 2000. He said:
"Hey Jed-Eye -"
(Yeah, I know - I thought Arty was saying "Jedi", too. For like five years. Then he typed it out in an e-mail.)
"- I've been listening to your CD, and I know what your music is good for. But you're not gonna like it."
So I called him back and I asked what my music was good for.
"Well," Arty said, "for ROCK AND ROLL, it's 1985. But for BROADWAY, it's 2005!"
He was right: I didn't like that.
I recently discovered that I hate this Republican ticket more than I hate musicals, which is amazing to me because I never thought I could hate anything more than musicals. In fact, my steady regimen of therapeutic songwriting and elimination of shitty people from my social circle has left my life virtually hate-free, so the deep dark depths of my loathing of musical theater seem, by comparison, ever deeper, darker, and depthier as the years go by.
I hate the affected way Broadway singers sing. Especially in "jukebox musicals", where they force all this hot air into pop songs that were once delivered with genuine emotion by untrained but passionate rock singers. I hate the contrived plots and the goofy dancing, and I really, really hate the way the characters break into song in midsentence for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It's all so fucking lame and stupid. Particularly "conversation songs", where two characters sing their dialogue because hey, it's a musical.
I do like "Hair". In fact, I'd say the original Broadway cast recording is one of the four or five biggest influences on my songwriting. But that's because I've never seen the stage musical, so I only know "Hair" as a collection of killer tunes with an edge that even the nastiest contemporary rock music is afraid to approach. I've never had to sit and watch some gimpy actor stopping in the middle of a conversation to sing "White boys are so pretty..."
So when Arturo told me that we were gonna write a musical, I was mostly grossed out. But I agreed to give it a shot... because it was Arturo's idea, and he's wrong less often than I am, and I know it.
After six months, we had a basic plot - three college friends reunite in New York City at a neighborhood nightclub. A girl from their shared past shows up, and here comes the shit. Along the way, we meet the other folks who hang around the club, friends and foes. In the end, love wins. We also had a title, "Rise and Shine".
Arturo got to work on the book. Unable to accept the whole "breaking spontaneously into song" thing, I decided to write the thing as an operetta, leaving open the possibility that songs could be removed for dialogue if necessary. I was resigned to the idea that no matter how tightly I tied it all up, some showbiz douchebag was eventually gonna slice and dice my work so little kids and old people could sit through it without getting uncomfortable.
My workaround was to do up a full-on "cast recording", like the version of "Hair" I liked so much. I found myself most productive when thinking of the play as a very long album - something I could understand. I wanted it finished to my specifications, frozen in place so that no matter who got their hands on the musical later, my vision for it would at least exist somewhere. Most importantly, I wanted the songs to be performed by real rock singers, free of that phony Broadway affectation. My hope was that their vocals would serve as a template for how the songs should be sung.
"Rise and Shine" ultimately grew to 40 songs, almost two and a half hours of music. My recording featured a cast of 17 singers - it was a crazy quilt of left-field pairings like CJ Ramone harmonizing with Dom Maltempi... Bryan Thomas duetting with Kitty Kowalski... Dicky Barrett in a doo-wop group with Brian Dewan and Mike Keaney. It was an unwieldy project, to say the least. Singers were brought in for a day and we'd rocket through their dozens of parts, unable in many cases to get confident performances because there was so much material and nobody had time to learn and rehearse it properly in advance.
Arturo and I were divided on the recording process - he thought I should keep it simple, just doing piano demos and singing everything myself. My pace was also frustrating to Arty. He saw the musical as one big thing and wondered why I couldn't just finish it. I saw it as a collection of songs: 40 small things, each requiring equal attention, craft and care.
Also, many of these lyrics had to come from the perspective of characters very different from me. Finding common ground so I could write honestly was difficult but essential, and it resulted in a number of hard-won songs I'm very proud of. One of them, "Fabulous Inside", involves a drag queen explaining why s/he dresses up; Arturo, who has just such a flamboyant side, read the lyric at a poetry slam and got a standing ovation. Everybody thought he had written it himself. That felt great.
Where is "Rise and Shine" today? Right where it's been since early 2005, when I burned out on it and called time. I had to visit some very difficult places for those songs and I could just feel my gears grinding. After putting the musical aside, I spent a year laying fallow. Wrote only one song in that time (and in my sleep, no less - that shit was gettin did whether I liked it or not!). I was starting to wonder if maybe my songbox was busted.
(That was before "Pop" and "You Are Boring The Shit Out Of Me" showed up. And "Duck And Cover", and "She Loves You (NO NO NO)" and "Northside" and "Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts" and "When I Step Off The Train" and "We're Both Wrong But You're Also A Dick" and... oh, you'll see.)
By this coming April, I'll have four years' worth of albums queued up for release. That buys me time to jump back on "Rise and Shine" and finish it once and for all. Please understand that I'm doing this not for fortune, fame or even fun - I'm going back to this project because I've come to believe it would be nice to finally see a musical and not hate it.
Later today, a package will be headed my way from California. I don't know if it's coming FedEx or USPS, in an envelope or a box. I don't know if it will be here tomorrow, or midweek, or next week. But I'm probably not gonna sleep until it gets here.
The package contains, in some form, the cover art to The Cutting-Room Floor. It's the last piece of a puzzle I've been putting together since 1999, when I recorded four songs ("Before I Was Born", "Interesting Times", "Denny's 3am" and "Snot") at the old Scarlet East Studio in Albany. And in the case of "Denny's 3am", at the Western Avenue Denny's. Scarlet East has moved and that Denny's is long gone, but my album is still here, waiting.
My original plan for The Cutting Room Floor was to make an organic full-band recording after several electronicky synth-and-sample-based albums. I hated the way my records sounded with all the drum machines and phony instruments; CRF would start with sequenced tracks but then I'd replace them all with live players.
The project started off a mess, with my bass player quitting the day we were supposed to drive up to Albany and record. We tracked piano after hours at a local music store, where the pianos were gorgeous but out of tune. We brought a makeshift version of Scarlet East to New York City so we could tape a standup bassist named Steve Watson in the Music Building on 8th Avenue, trying to minimize the sonic bleed of The Strokes rehearsing on the floor below.
We were able to tame the beast eventually, and three of the four tracks turned out usable. I was beginning to work with outside producers as well, learning how to operate in a real studio and help other musicians perform at their best. Joey Ramone insisted that Daniel Rey produce a couple songs. From that session came "Native Son" - ironically, a piano ballad. Brian Dewan brought his menagerie of antique instruments aboard for "Let Go", "I Have A Rose" and the album's title track, adding layers of zither, accordion and organ.
I signed a record contract halfway through recording and put The Cutting-Room Floor on hold for almost a year. When that deal went sour, I returned to the album with a new song, "Blood", inspired by the experience.
The Cutting-Room Floor was also shaped by omission - a number of the songs I'd written for the album, including "1991", "If They Don't Come Back", and "Aftermath", were pulled out of play because Tommy Ramone wanted to produce them. Another, "Blue Tears", was too different from the rest of the material, too jarring.
After four years of recording and rerecording, it finally came time to mix. I had been in touch with Dave Fridmann, who produced and engineered all those great Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev records, about mixing the stuff, but he was booked out for a year. He did generously agree to give my local engineer a phone lesson on how to get that awesome Fridmann drum sound. But the engineer never called Dave, proclaiming that he didn't need to - he had deciphered the signal chain just by listening to the records! After ten hours of tweaking, the engineer collapsed in a crying heap next to the mixing board, unable to find that sound.
I called Dave in a panic. He responded with the kindest thing anybody in this shitty business ever did for me: the man mixed "Before I Was Born" on the house, then gave me his studio for two weeks and invited Belle and Sebastian producer Tony Doogan over from Scotland to mix. Also, when we got to Dave's place in Cassadaga, he whipped up a crazy Fourth of July barbeque and bought everyone McFlurries. Then we all watched fireworks on Lake Erie and mixed The Cutting-Room Floor for two incredible weeks. I'll never be able to thank Dave Fridmann enough, though I could probably start by putting the album out already.
Which brings me to this package that's coming. It's being sent by a fellow named Victor Moscoso, whose bright and brillant color choices and trippy hand-lettering have been inspiring my design work since high school. Victor is one of San Francisco's "Big Five" - the poster artists who defined the psychedelic movement in the late '60s with their Family Dog and Fillmore silkscreens. Remember the posters I used to make for Skyscape back in college? I was doing everything in my power to channel Moscoso.
Much of Victor's work begins with found images, like photographs. He asked for some inspiration in this regard, and I forwarded him a few stills from Sergei Eisenstein's !Que Viva Mexico!, which are not only beautiful in their own right, but also apt - that film was shelved, unfinished, in the 1930's and spend most of the intervening time on... the cutting-room floor.
I was still living in Farmingdale when I started work on this album. It's followed me to Queens (where I recorded the intro to "Queens Is Where You Go When You're Dead" at 4am on the J train) and now Manhattan. It's a map of my musical life, and also a blueprint - my subsequent projects have flowed forth from it like veins, and the techniques and lessons I learned making The Cutting-Room Floor have informed everything else I've done.
It now takes about four months to press vinyl; demand for the format has overwhelmed the few remaining quailty pressing plants. The album will have to wait a bit longer to see daylight, but at least all the pieces will finally be in place!
My pal Sputnik stayed with LB and me for half of 2006 while he went to culinary school. Before his visit, I didn't watch much TV and I didn't understand anything about cooking. I still don't watch much TV, and I still don't understand anything about cooking - but I will say that thanks to Sputnik, when the television is on, it's usually dialed in to the Food Network.
I know better than to attempt any of the recipes I see on TV. I'd just fuck all that shit up. Lucky for me, though, I live in New York City, where most of the Food Network action happens; many of the restaurants they profile are in my neighborhood. The farthest I've travelled on a FN tip: walked 85 blocks up the West Side for breakfast at Barney Greengrass, The Sturgeon King. That was a hike, but the place came recommended by Bourdain so I didn't see where I had a choice. (And it was good as advertised, right down to the black and white cookies.)
Bobby Flay's "Throwdown" always seems to be on when I tune in. I find the conceit of the show (Food Network tricks local chefs into thinking they're getting their own pilot, only to have Bobby Flay show up and try to humiliate them with a cook-off in front of everyone they know) pretty rotten. But the real purpose of "Throwdown" is to leverage Bobby Flay's reputation into exposure for area chefs. And the dude does get schooled more often than not... good sports all around.
I'll visit just about any restaurant that appears on "Throwdown", almost on principle. The folks who battle Bobby Flay are supposedly the best at what they do, and besides, I believe they should get a return on all that agita. I'm hoping to organize a trip to Bove's in Vermont for lasagna on a Wednesday night in November. In fact... if you'd like to come, let me know, whoever the fuck you are.
I also try to get to restaurants that boast "Iron Chef America" regulars and challengers in the kitchen. Yeah, I drink Food Network's gourmet Kool-Aid. But I feel that awesome food improves the day-to-day quality of your life, and as such the channel provides a generous service.
So endeth my free plug for the Food Network. You didn't ask but I told ya anyway.
-------
We had something like a Hanslick Rebellion rehearsal yesterday. Mike was under the weather but the rest of us met up and jammed for a bit, starting work on a new tune, "Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts".
I also pitched the guys "Enjoy It" but they did not like the song. I think they're completely fucking insane on that count. Stephen Scarlata rules.
It's September 22... The Hanslick Rebellion's 13th anniversary. YAY us!
So ya know what this means...
The Rebellion's new reggaetonrock single is finally here. Wow. It's been ready for a while - we got tired of sitting on it months ago, but we needed to wait until the Eschatone store was up to snuff before we could let it loose, because it is something new: a t-shirt single. Here's the deal:
You click right here. This will transport you to the magical land of Eschatone, where the dew drops cry and the cats meow. You buy The Rebellion's glorious three-song single, download it instantly, and a couple days later, you get the "packaging" - an amazing five-color American Apparel t-shirt designed by the great Arturo Vega himself - in the mail. That's the album cover; it's just printed on fabric instead of paper.
It's digital, it's physical, it's musical and it's wearable. If the format works out for Eschatone, it's something that will enable the label to put out more music by more artists more often. We've all got our fingers crossed.
(Waaaaaay back when I was a copywriter, I had to cook up an ad for a product called The Musical Sweater. It was a "wool-like" red sweater - we had to use keywords like "comfy" and "toasty warm" to describe the thing - with this hideous Atari 2600-lookin holiday scene embroidered on it, and a chip sewn in that played "Jingle Bells" when pushed. In fact, I think the chip was in the torso area so you actually had to press a boob to hear the music. Did it still work after washing? How the fuck should I know? I'm a copywriter, not a fucking scientist. Point is, The Musical Sweater sucked but our t-shirt single is awesome.)
The three tracks, "Let's Get To The Fucking", "Magnetic North" and "Ground The Paper Planes", were among a handful of The Rebellion's "unfinished business" tunes - songs we began writing back in the day (we even played "Magnetic North" out once or twice) but never recorded because the band had imploded.
Alex and I are huge Mets fans, and we began getting into reggaeton a couple years ago when we noticed that it was every Met's intro music. I love that loping beat, and it struck me as odd that it wasn't being used in rock music. We had used a calypso variation of the Dem Bow rhythm in our song "Leave Your Boyfriend" way back when, so it didn't seem like much of a stretch to inject a bit of reggaeton into the Rebellion's game.
I could write a book on this recording... it was both the most difficult and dense thing we've tried, and the most fun (well.. second most. Nothing can top the recording of the rebellion is here.). Maybe more in another post... for now, I'll leave you to listen to the tunes.
Every year, I like to at least attempt recording some kind of "holiday greeting CD". That's a greeting card for friends, and a CD. (Cue Janitor from Scrubs: "Drill-fork! You can drill and fork!") Some people mail out photos of their kids at Christmas; my songs are my kids so I share them thusly.
I've done two holiday CDs so far, both with the same format: one Christmas-themed original song, and nine cover tunes. I try to arrange the covers so that they sound like they were recorded by a third party who is neither the original artist nor me. For example: Randy Newman's "Political Science" as performed by Cheap Trick; Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" as performed by Peter Gabriel; Herman's Hermits' "No Milk Today" as performed by The Shins; Sparks' "When I'm With You" as performed by Crescent and Frost (that one was easiest - I recorded it with Crescent and Frost). I named the "series" In The Presence Of Presents, after a typically hilarious Chris Radtke ad-lib.
The process can be time-consuming and costly. Sometimes I don't finish in time and have to put the recording aside for the following year (sending out a holiday card in mid-January is like wearing a Hallowe'en costume at Thanksgiving, in my opinion). Last year I was too deep into other projects to do one at all. I've learned that if I'm gonna make a holiday CD, this is the time of year that I need to get cookin on it.
I hate not sending something out. Facebook and MySpace are really only good for reminding people that they know each other in a bullshitty, networky sort of way. Though loosely tethered to my far-flung friends via online social sites, I feel like a tangible token of love and good will is important, even if I can only make and send one of these a year.
I'm fairly determined to get something together for this Christmas, but I have so many projects in front of me right now that I can't possibly start another. The only thing I can think to do is make a sampler of all of 'em... one finished track from each of these: The Cutting-Room Floor, Band Of The Week 15th Anniversary remix, Failing Upwards, Shoot The Piano Player, Zetacarnosa, Rise And Shine, and three other records-in-progress. Is that cheating? I'd be flipping the script a little - nine originals and one holiday cover. See, there's this Oscar the Grouch song I'd like to try...
The best rap song of all times is "Chocolate Strawberry".
Take it from me - a guy who knows. Back in the day, I spent good lawnmowing money on UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne", ALL of the rebuttal raps from women named Roxanne (i.e. "The Real Roxanne"), ALL of the rebuttals to the rebuttals (including "Roxanne's Doctor (The Real Man)"), and ALL of the Roxannes' rebuttals to the rebuttals of their rebuttals (such as "Roxanne's Revenge"). I was trading boombox mixtapes when the rest of you were listening to Debby Boone. When I say the best rap song, it's the best and that's so for real.
I even ran a fantasy baseball team called Chocolate Strawberry a couple seasons ago. While I did not win, I did take home the award for KVP (Koolest Valuable Player).
Don't even watch the video when you play it... just close your eyes and let the music take control!
CART
