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.
Ok, so I've been living in Bath in the UK... or sort of. I started a new job and it happened in such short order, that I had to rent a room and move here in a very big hurry. I'm subletting my room in Totnes to a friend who could make use of it and will probably be moving all my stuff down here in December or January.
I've been putting in solitary rehearsals here every day, and getting together with El for rehearsal purposes when and where possible. Last weekend, we rehearsed in London and Bath. El's taking up some management and booking responsibilities for me, which takes pressure off that front. She's doing a great job (better than I can do for myself).
I'm really glad to be away from Dartington, as the experience of watching it deteriorate was excruciating. It is not anywhere near the same place I started studying and teaching at, but it's still hard to swallow the increasingly precipitous decline toward the situation in Falmouth.
My new work is with the University of Bath's Institute for Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts. In basic terms, I do the music side of things here; organizing various activities for students and programming professional work. I really like the folks I work with and Bath is a very beautiful place. So, I could be doing worse.
Until this week, I've been getting to work an hour and a half early, so I can write songs and do a quick guitar practice session. Over the weekend, I got a really nasty sinus infection, which put me out of the picture yesterday and today. I hope I'm back at work tomorrow, and back at full steam on Thursday. Being sick sucks.
I'm hoping to start making more blog entries about the record soon, as there is activity surrounding it, including the first review, a very prestigious shop in London ordering five copies and, of course, more stuff about the actual songs on the record to come as well.
Plus, I hope to have some photos from a performance I was involved with in London over this past weekend.
Ok, hope that all makes sense. I'm going to sleep!
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.
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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.
More soon. I've just moved to Bath UK. Hearing some great feedback concerning the record here in the UK, and we're launching into booking and press stuff. If I understand correctly, things are beginning to percolate in the states as well! Hope you're all digging the tunes!
CART
