Axl Rose, you are my bitch

You know it, baby. And I know it hurts. You've crossed my mind over the years as we struggled with our own Chinese Democracy, as it went from eagerly anticipated to wishful hoax to mostly forgotten. I understand the pressure, the self-doubt, the personal demons - rock n roll ain't beanbag, eh? But dude, you've got bijillions of dollars, talented minions at your beck and call... why can't you get it done? I'll tell you why: you have no vision. How could you ever find your album when you were lost on day one?

That's why our record is done and yours is not. I've had a vision for this album from the beginning, the delays mostly boil down to execution and lack of money. You've got cornrows and endless tapes of wandering suck.

Seriously, though, I know the answer to your problem. All you've got to do is pick the dozen best tunes you've come up with, record them live to 2 track in a room with good acoustics, done. After all the drama, an honest rock and roll album is probably the last thing anyone expects from you. Don't worry about the videos, only ass-kissers do that shit. You can do whatever you want... so why don't you? Until then, this nowhere rock band PWNS you, and you are my bitch.

I always thought "Patience" was a good tune of yours. Especially when hearing it on the jukebox at Sindy's in a pre-gentrified Tremont back in Cleveland. That's gone now, right? It was at Fairfield and W. 11th street, SE corner. Hospital green interior. I picture hilljack girls swaying at the box, inevitably punching up some Bad Company to follow-up the GnR, maybe one of the Greeks coming up and following it with some of their homegrown bouzouki sides. I really knew times were changing when Beck and Nirvana not only appeared on the juke but were embraced by some of the regulars. That was kind of sad.

Cle HC bloggy goodness

Man, I love when people give my old days some love (Spike in Vain, The Dark). Goodbadmusic dishes on the New Hope comp LP.

inquiring minds

Wumme has questions:

Were Guided By Voices the doing and undoing of the label?

Yes.

But I did plenty of undoing on my lonesome. When GBV took off it would've been pretty easy to put out a bunch of similar stuff, goddess knows I got every Pollard-wannabe demo known to man after Bee Thousand came out. I didn't want to exploit that niche as one should do according to the record label textbook and I didn't like the idea of releasing x number of records per year just so bigger media would take Scat seriously. It almost did happen, though - in 1995 it was nearly certain that I'd sign Neutral Milk Hotel, but Jeff changed his mind and went with Merge because my short-lived Matador deal creeped him out.

But in the end I take full credit and blame for my fortunes. I think 20, 40 years from now the catalog will be more interesting and noteworthy as a result of my choices. My goals have always been more historically-oriented than success-oriented.

Why the eventual move to St. Louis?

Growing up in Cleveland is sort of like being in an abusive relationship. I've always moved frequently. I went to 8 different elementary schools, 3 of them in New York (Utica) or Florida (Ft. Lauderdale). I even spent a summer in Glendive, Montana while my mom recovered from broken nose, ribs and double pneumonia. Once I left home at 17, I tended to have a new place to live every 6-9 months. I've lived in six different spots since moving to St. Louis for that matter, and suspect I will not be here forever either. So I'd wanted to leave Cle for years, but my band was there and I had little money. At the end of '94 we no longer had a regular band and I did have some money. St. Louis was one of the more welcoming and beautiful places we'd been. Label and success-wise, it would've been better to move to NYC or Chicago. But I like a slow pace, so NYC was out and Chicago just seemed like a bigger, yet somehow lesser, version of Cleveland. StL was just right. I also liked the idea of being somewhat anonymous. That said, I don't think I'll ever totally lose the bluntness and cynicism that is the Cle heritage, but StL has softened up the edges a bit. I've learned to be a little friendlier. I'll always love Cleveland, I do enjoy visiting very much, but it's also a place filled with scars for me. It's a heavy town psychically and I'm a sensitive fuck.

Or you could say it was fate. It's strange, on several occasions I've written songs which later came true in unexpected ways. There's "Stuck in St. Louis" on the Della Street EP, and the line in "Kick Up Yr Heels" that goes, "from St. Louis, Missouri to the Florida keys," some other examples too. I went on a trip to the Keys not long after moving to StL. I even married a skinny girl with pretty little feet, too... didn't see that one coming.

Is Damon Che as much of an asshole as they say?

Man, if there was ever a guy who got a bum deal on the intertubes it's Damon. People who don't like him seem to have popular websites and people who do like him don't seem to have computers. I've met plenty of genuine assholes and he is not one of them. He's got a temper, he's self-critical and will not sell himself out musically. 99% of any asshole behavior on Damon's part is due to some combination of those things. He may not always express himself in the most constructive ways, but he's actually a very relaxed, easy-going cat 99% of the time I've been around him.

But hey, even if everything written about Damon were true, and even if it were worse than what's out there, he'd still be one of the greatest all around musicians of our day and I'd still be honored to consider him a friend. Asshole is just another word for misunderstood.

And jeebus, haven't any of these fucks heard the Buddy Rich Tapes?

we keep busy

We've actually got like another dozen albums in the can. Here's one:

some old bullshit

Man, I look at this thing and I just want to delete it. I've got that disclaimer bit over there and I'm not just being cute. We never talk about any of this shit when we're together, we mostly laugh and drink and play a song or two in between cracking each other up. As a group, we spend a lot more time thinking up shit like this:

the Adam Schmitt sessions

Fall, 1997, Urbana IL, the Indians-Marlins World Series underway, Adam Schmitt recorded us in his basement over three nights. We did 63 takes on a 1/2" Tascam 38 8-track deck. These were full "days" but often recording didn't begin until late in the afternoon and went on until 3 or 4 am. We used two different mic'ing strategies, so each song was recorded at least twice, some thrice.

At the time I was pretty worked up over how terrible records were beginning to sound. Between the increasingly widespread practice of 'peak level mastering' and the advent of digital recording, I vowed to engage in neither. I did not want our next album to sound 'big' - but I also didn't want to go as lo-fi as our initial 1995 sessions (the "Scissors Suite" was recorded on 8-track cassette with our first St. Louis drummer - and lead vocalist on one song - Ann Hirschfeld). Steve and Patrick were both originally from Champaign-Urbana and had known Adam for years and suggested we lay down our jams at his joint. He'd started recording very young and had even done some creative multi-tracking as a kid, bouncing back and forth between cassette decks, the mad scientist type. If there was ever a guy who could get the maximum results from minimal equipment, it's Adam. He has amazing hearing and stamina too. So off we went and Adam was all that and more. Although he's very much a pop guy, he understood what we were after (everybody playing in the same room, good aggressive tone, no gated snares, etc) and he delivered. When I mixed all the various recordings last year, Adam's were not only the easiest to mix (and not just because there were fewer tracks), but the band really jumped out of the speakers at us. Although the dynamic range is not as wide as on our later, 2" 24-track recordings, he got more out of that Tascam 38, Mackie board and a few inexpensive mics than anyone would think humanly possible. Even our engineer at Electrical, Rob Vester, was super impressed with these recordings. About a third of the album comes from these sessions, with a few of the songs being almost completely live, even vocals and some guitar solos: The Cut-Out Bin (first 2/3rds, drum fill and final chorus were recorded elsewhere nearly 10 years later), I Will Comment, Fuck Your Self-Esteem, Dream Along, The Understudy, It Was a Very Good Year, Favorite Hospital, and some of the middle freakout in Fake Your Own Death were all recorded by Adam.

So the why so long part. Despite being at the top of our game and having genial recording conditions, for many years I thought of these sessions as a near-total loss. I came home with four 60 minute cassettes of all the rough mixes and set out to determine which takes to finish. They generally sounded good, but we had been woodshedding the songs so intensely that I got lost in the details (do you see a theme here?) - I obsessed over tempi, feel and accents and was always able to find an unwanted flaw in everything we did. It's not that a perfect performance was sought, but for it to be perfectly broken. I always want the music to hurt a little bit. Though I didn't know it at the time, we did achieve all that in spades. But even moreso, it was apparent that some of the songs were not ready, regardless of performance, especially the early versions of Year of the Donk and what we called Nowhere Near at that time (and is on DM as A Very Good Year). We'd gone through at least a dozen different arrangements of each, if not more, with new parts added, old ones taken away, ad nauseam. I changed them every week for at least a year, then changed them some more, a few times, several years later. The more I listened to the roughs, the worse it sounded to me, but I did settle on five songs that I thought were pretty good even though I thought at least two of them were "B-sides at best" but well-performed and we did a few overdubs on those a year later. If you'd asked me at the time how the album was coming I would've said, "we've got some stuff recorded, but most of it didn't come out well. We maybe have a short EP."

As time went on, I felt worse and worse about the recordings. After putting the band through hell for a couple years with the endless revisions, I didn't have the heart to put any of us through more of the same and our activity level began to really drop off. And after a while it starts to seem like there's no point to doing any of it. Why play out? We hadn't had an album in a few years, no prospects of finishing one, and to top it off it was really starting to seem like underground interest in rock music was hitting an all-time low. Grunge had been rechristened Stoner Rock and sent off to its own little ghetto while post-rock and pop twaddle ruled the day. Why finish the album? It'd probably just get slagged for being too rock and having guitar solos on it. I had a new baby, a wife, and nowhere near enough money. There were very, very few current bands I liked, so I lost myself in jazz and early 70s hard rock lacunae (Morgen, Dust, Buffalo, Bang, etc) and was much happier for it.

There are very few songs on Dirty Moons with a standard verse/chorus structure. When we made The Roaring Third the idea had been all killer, no filler, big hooks, big choruses, big rock, work the archetypes, etc. That was a good thing and many people connected deeply enough with it to ask about a new album for years afterwards (and without that encouragement from you all we might not have been inspired to finish this one, so cheers), but afterwards I was ready for something different, initially that was to create big contrasts within the songs themselves, but much of the writing was very intuitive and as a result rather hit or miss. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I knew it wasn't just "catchy songs" (in fact I purposely avoided those to some degree, for DM: expression > hooks) so whenever I picked up the guitar and something struck me I ran with it without much thought. (another duality to smash: cerebral content vs. instinct) Listening back to our roughs, four hours of them, made it pretty clear that this was not the best m.o. - and maybe I just didn't know how to write the kinds of songs I wanted. Truth is, I didn't, most of the time anyway. Now I do, but I needed some time to get there.

So for several years I would not listen to these recordings, it just made me depressed. But then one day I decided to transfer some of the better songs to my computer and I was shocked by how amazingly great some of the tracks were. Time is a beautiful thing. I changed my mind about the five "good" songs, ditched two of them, and added a bunch more. Today I am beyond proud of these particular recordings, they are definitely a peak for us in terms of intensity and you-are-there live sound. But don't think that there are hours of great tracks lost, I'd still say at least half the recordings aren't worth hearing. At some point I plan to finish the best outtakes and release an LP's worth of them, though probably half would be different versions (often radically so) of songs that are on Dirty Moons. There are only a few "lost" songs, but there are a good number of "different" ones.