Vans are reserved; flights booked. I even got Cubs tickets for when we pass through Chicago. All I need to do now is make hotel reservations and attach a couple loyalty programs to my credit card so I get points on all this. Posters are being printed (silkscreens for the solo gigs; letterpress - at Hatch Show Print! - for Jeebus). Tour is go.
Now I can concentrate on the music. I've got three different bands to rehearse. The only musician besides me who is doing all the shows is Reeves. Luckily, the band coming for my solo tour is basically Jeebus minus Alex: Reeves, Mike, and Matt Johnson. We can work up a nice chemistry during our first week on the road which will serve us well when it's time to tackle the more challenging Music of Jeebus.
For a keyboard player, there is one extra step in the process of learning material: in addition to getting the notes under your fingers, you also need to sort out the sounds you're using. That means choosing and sometimes creating sounds for each song, then building a program that maps the sounds across the keyboard so everything you'll need to play that song is available to you. I don't believe in using multiple keyboards... that shit is just for show. You have two hands; with smart mapping you can lay all the sounds you need for a song over 88 keys. Maybe you'll need to change programs once or twice during a song, but you don't need two fuckin keyboards. I once wrung every single note of Faith No More's Angel Dust out of a keytar. That's 45 lousy keys.
Speaking of keytar, it's what I'll be bringing out for the Jeebus tour. The keytar, a Roland AX-1, adds another wrinkle. In addition to programming the external brain which contains the sounds, you also need to program the keytar. You have to assign functions to each of its inputs - the ribbon controller, the expression controller, the sustain button. Each keytar program has to be set up individually to correspond with a program in the external sound module. For example, if I want to put a wah on a synth sound, I not only have to program a wah in the sound module; I also have to tell the keytar that its expression controller pumps the wah.
All of that is time-intensive, but it makes a huge difference on stage and through the PA. The current set of Jeebus material is (mercifully) simple, keyboard-wise; plenty of notes but not many sounds to a song, and those sounds are relatively straightforward archetypes like "piano", "organ", "pad" or "growl". In the future, as the arrangements get more adventurous, I plan on running my keyboards in stereo and programming sounds so they bounce and fly all around the room.
My first rehearsal with another human being is on Sunday. Two hours for the Bitter End show with Anton Fig. I can't wait. Also, I hope I don't completely embarrass myself!
I'm hiking up a mountain. It's evening. Twilight. There are a few people with me - I can't make out who they are, but I know they are friends of mine, very good friends. We navigate a trail, pushing aside thick branches and vines as we climb.
The forest clears and we're at the end of the trail. We are standing on a cliff. In front of us is the reason we climbed the mountain. It's the most beautiful view in the whole world.
Directly below us, in a valley, city lights shine - like the Mulholland Drive lights you see in movies. By a trick of dream-perspective, the city thins out to plainly visble suburbs and then to what appears to be a coastal town, with fields, a few small houses and a little white church bathed in the orange-red glow of the setting sun.
Beyond that, a beach. Then the ocean, reflecting that huge yellow sun as it falls over the horizon. Two islands are silhouetted before the sun. One is covered in forest, and the trees are outlined in all sorts of fiery colors against the black, backlit bulk of the island. Someone on the shore of that island has built a small bonfire. The other island is farther away; it appears to be mostly rocky and is completely dark save two small lights in the hills, one green and one red.
The sun continues to set. The sky fades from red to blue to starry black overhead. We stare, desperate to take it all in. And then we get even more. The sky opens up.
High above us, the stars were already out in their thousands. Now triangular cracks appear in the heavens, full of crazy checkerboard patterns and oozing abstract shapes. Enormous wedges of light and color, almost too huge to take in, reveal glimpses of planets much, much larger than the earth. And they're coming through these jagged splits in the sky. It's terrifying, yet even more beautiful than everything else we'd seen from that mountaintop.
Suddenly, the sky explodes with pulsating light - yellow, white, red. Like when a bomb blows up in a cartoon. It goes on and on, and it's the only thing there is.
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When I woke from that dream, I scrambled over to my desk, grabbed my sketchbook and colored pencils and did my best to draw the scene before it faded from memory. The result was a landscape and a seascape, but it mostly was a skyscape.
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Domenic Maltempi and I got drafted onto the same soccer team when we were in second grade. Given my estrangement from family, that makes Dom the person in my life I know the longest. I still remember some of the shit Dom did that cracked me up at the age of six, though I can't really explain what about it was so fuckin funny. Dom is a supervillain with the power to make me laugh, mostly at inappropriate times.
Like in journalism class, twelfth grade. Dom would sneak up behind the teacher, Mrs. Swenson, and pretend to stick his finger up her ass. Nobody found this as hilarious as I did. Swenson kept asking me what was so funny - while my hysterics were distracting her from the show Dom was putting on scant inches from her backside.
It was in Swenson's class that Dom and I wrote our first song. It was supposed to be called "Yeah, That's Stupid", but once Dom's lyric was done and put to my music, the name changed to "Clouds". We liked the song and decided to form a band around it. Only problem was, we were dorks who couldn't play music worth a shit.
We ended up with a drummer named Kevin, who could only handle one beat per song, and a never-ending succession of guitarists. We had a keyboard player and no bassist, so we convinced one of the best guitarists in the school, Rob Haussmann, to join us 'cause we sounded "just like" his favorite band: The Doors. That ruse didn't last long, and Rob soon quit because, as he said, "I'm in six bands and this is the worst one."
We were the worst band, but we were a band... that had to count for something, right? We couldn't "shred". We had short hair. We used a keyboard. Nobody wanted us to play their house party, or Homecoming, or the Roxy. But we were a band anyway. Climbing a treacherous trail, over all obstacles, to reach that clearing and experience something transcendent. I named us Skyscape.
Dom, Kevin and I played our first show together at Erik Christiansen's house on March 7, 1992. There were about a dozen people in attendance. One of them taped the show using a small boombox. This is what we sounded like:
It was also at Erik's house that I got the worst advice I ever received. This came from Sean Gould.
We had just finished playing our second gig in Erik's folks' living room. Sean sat in on guitar. Then I asked him to join the band, and he told me he would - if we replaced Kevin with a better drummer.
"But Kevin is our friend," I said.
"This isn't music friends," 17-year-old Sean replied. "This is the music business."
The only thing dumber than that advice is ME, 'cause I took it. We fired Kevin the next day. And I can trace every bad decision I've made in music since then back to that conversation with Sean.
Many years later, Arturo Vega told me: Whomever you do your work with is the most important person in your life.
That's good advice.
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Skyscape has lasted, with the occasional argument-length hiatus, for almost twenty years. We've recorded countless demos and released one CD. We've sold out clubs. We've played empty rooms. We've had dozens of bandmates. There were times when I tried to keep the band going without Dom, but it was never really Skyscape. And Dom and I have tried to start other bands together, but they're always really Skyscape.
Dom moved to Texas in the late 1990s. We'd had a falling out so I didn't give a fuck where he was. But one afternoon I got a cryptic e-mail from somebody named "Bartleby Scantron", and knew instantly that could only be Dom.
I wrote back: "Dom, why don't you just say 'hello'?"
Soon I was getting a lyric a week via e-mail from Texas. I put a few to music. By the time Dom moved back to New York, we had the makings of a new Skyscape CD: Zetacarnosa.
I decided to involve as many of our ex-bandmates as I could. The core group included the entire Hanslick Rebellion, all of whom had served time in Skyscape at some point. There were a few Skyscapers I couldn't track down, but thanks to my exhaustive archive of old four-track recordings, most of them ended up on the album anyway.
Zetacarnosa was a tough record to make for a lot of reasons. Personnel juggling; technical difficulties (a third of the tracks got misplaced by an engineer and needed to be re-cut); labor-intensive editing of almost antique material to make it fit with the modern recordings... it took four years to finish. Worth every second.
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Dom was getting married and he wanted my help writing a song for the wedding. He sent me a lyric titled "Mare Spumans" - "the foaming sea".
The song was about the glory and wonderful pageantry of a wedding day. But it was really about the panic and confusion that shadow an irrevocable life-changing decision; it was about settling, and learning the frightening lesson that sometimes love is not the reason you're in a relationship. And Dom didn't even realize he'd put all this in there... his lyric betrayed the doubt below the surface, and also the fact that he was trying to hide it, or avoid it.
This left me with the dilemma: should I put this tragedy to music? There was something so self-fulfilling about the thing. It made the whole affair feel doomed. Should I even point any of this out to my friend, warn him?
In the end, I kept my mouth shut and wrote the best fuckin wedding music I could.
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On Monday night, Dom and I will head back to where we began: a tiny room, where we will play with a drummer (in this case, Joe Abba) for what is sure to be a small crowd. This time the room is not Erik Christiansen's parents' living room, but The Living Room in New York City. Upstairs at The Living Room, to be exact - at the piano bar they call Googie's Lounge. In all these years, we've only made it up one floor from the living room, har har.
But it's as good a place as any to start our next attempt at that old familiar climb... up the mountain, through the forest, dreaming of that clearing. Not knowing who will be with us when we get there, but certainly friends, very good friends.
I would like to, at some point, take a killer band on a week-long tour... play a set of a dozen brand-new songs... and then bring the band directly into a studio to record those songs.
I would really like to do that. I'd like to do it soon.
CART
