January 26, 2012

History Lesson: You String Me

“You String Me,” from Larry (1994)
I had arrived at college as one kind of stock character, the former student council president still in love, long-distance, with his high school sweetheart, and in less than three months I’d morphed into another: the lost freshman boy who slept all the time, a pale arm sometimes extending, cautiously, from under the comforter to write on the wall.

Wedged in the slime, they say: “We had been sullen
in the sweet air that’s gladdened by the sun;
we bore the mist of sluggishness in us:
now we are bitter in the blackened mud.”

So said “the souls of those whom anger has defeated” in Canto VII of the Inferno. I know it’s the passage I wrote on my wall because I underlined it in my Signet paperback, including a note in the margin that diligently says, “I wrote this on my wall,” as if it would be on the midterm. I had two roommates, just one wall to myself in that entire room, and I vandalized it. There had to be somewhere else to write away anger and defeat.

Turn it outward, blast it at a bunch of people with cups in their hands. If it’s loud enough and you mean it enough, and if in the process of being loud and meaning it you suddenly find you’re enjoying yourself, they will buy it. Maybe not buy buy, like with money, but they’ve all been strung along and they’ve all been drunk and they all like Nirvana too, which is fortunate since here—two years later now—we’re playing a cross between “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Rape Me.” Of course it’s only a complete coincidence that this song was written the same month that In Utero came out: It’s not a rip-off, it was the zeitgeist! The singer is stinkin’ dee-runk. The entire band is a little off, a little uncool, and so all the more credibly unhinged: Justin goes atomic on his solo. Jamie’s running his 1987 keyboard through a flanger pedal to make it sound like a jet plane. And there are conga drums. Allies. They let it build into the second part, secretly known, to me alone, as “Part II: The Temples of Kajahbada,” an extended instrumental jam wherein I imagined my Peavey Predator shooting laser beams. Straight through the wall.

This was Larry. In time, at the end of our shows, they would chant Larry, Larry, Larry.

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January 23, 2012

History Lesson: What Was I Gonna Do?

“What Was I Gonna Do?,” from A Very Fine Sample of What’s Available at the Mine (2005)
I am on the mini futon sofa in the control room in the Shed in Manchester, Connecticut, sometime between 2000, when we started recording our debut full-band breakthrough, A Very Fine Sample of What’s Available at the Mine, and 2005, when we finished. Many great bands take five years to record an album. Just look at the Stone Roses. The refrigerator switches on periodically and makes the power surge, the lights swooning briefly. Once in a while you’d hear that click on the recording, but it was a small cost for keeping the 30-pack of High Life cold. Natron and I are in repose, the day either done or not yet started; either way, he has just stepped back inside after enjoying a Black & Mild on the porch, and I have just gotten good and high to sharpen my creative faculties to a lethally incisive point. Jake will come around later. We listen to the playback as I flip through a Playboy and set the bottom of my foot flat against the wall in the tiny room, within the shoe-shaped outline that somebody already helpfully traced there with a Sharpie. We talk of the Egg’s next ventures, of the rise we see so clearly before us. We are young hitmakers. A label would surely want to get involved, and furthermore this song, I say, is ripe for a video. We’ll put it together at my parents’ house in Nantucket in the summer, everybody dressed in white like Nelly would do it. Couples dancing as the sun set, gin and tonics, croquet, happy good-looking people. My little cousin Matt? He would film it. He’d probably even do it for free. He was just a kid in art school and I was like a god to him. Who wouldn’t want to hang with his rock-star cousin?

New Thunderegg History Lesson every Monday and Thursday.

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January 19, 2012

History Lesson: Double Reverse

“Double Reverse,” from Personnel Envelo-file (1997)
Another number from the putt-putt series, recorded in the spring of 1996. I would take the Peter Pan bus to Hartford to visit Jake, to see the action transpire at Scarlett O’Hara’s in its unlikely location downtown, unlikely because there was not too much left of downtown Hartford. In the 1950s its heart was ripped out to make room for parking garages for the insurance companies. Somebody should have filed a claim for that. 

Nonetheless on the ride up Friday night I would start to get that feeling of eager anticipation, of knowing I was going to see a friend and drink beer and carry on: I loved looking forward to going out. At the bar I would watch loud girls talk and listen to the Dead cover band sound a lot like the Dead while an old local named Yogi played air clarinet on his necktie. On the way up, in my eager anticipation, I would talk to whoever was next to me on the bus. Or I would eavesdrop and be fascinated that not everybody lived my Hartford rock ’n’ roll dream.

6/9/96: The people in front of me on the bus are engaged in a discussion about religion. The clean-cut man looks to be from Utah but he’s from the greater Simsbury, CT, metropolitan region. He became a Jehovah’s Witness 7 years ago when he was “young,” 14. Now he talks about creationism in an aw-shucks tone of voice and ruffs his hair every once in a while.

Psh! What a mollycoddle! Then again he was talking to a girl and I’m sure he got her number in the end. Me? This might have been the same trip that, running to the bus and hungry, I found a tube of Ritz crackers on the floor of the Port Authority bus terminal. I was, of course, aware of Port Authority’s reputation, but the wax paper was crisply sealed and not a single cracker felt crumbled. I ate all thirty-eight of them as I rode north. Chicks dig shit like that.

I wrote this song on the way back, and if the words describe defeat, it feels like I don’t mind that much, which I considered to be the ultimate victory. Maybe spacing out to the Beach Boys all the time wasn’t entirely in vain. Maybe the next cassette would be better than New England Music. Back in Brooklyn I would record it and then wait impatiently for my next opportunity to ride a bus and be excited for who and what I’d see when it stopped.

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January 17, 2012

Sweetest One, now available digitally

Today we celebrate the digital release of Thunderegg’s 2004 album Sweetest One, which features early versions of such favorites as “The Scheduled Show,” “Long Way from Home,” and “If You Knew Me So Well” alongside lesser-known gems like “Deliverance from Crack Rock,” “I’m a Fool Again,” and “When the Cables Break.”

This is the Egg’s most low-fi venture, which makes it easy not to notice that it’s also a strong set of songs. I used only three of the Portastudio’s four available tracks when I was recording it, with the intention of overdubbing drums on the remaining track in the end. So everything’s really squished, the bass and the guitars and the vocals all stacked on top of each other. And then, unfortunately for my big vision, so it had to remain, because it turned out it’s really hard to record drums last. That’s why nobody ever does it that way.

Still, if you can get into the spirit of it, there are rewards to be reaped.

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January 16, 2012

History Lesson: Dog Leg

“Dog Leg,” from New England Music (1996)
There is a batch of Thunderegg songs with titles drawn directly from the scorecard of a putt-putt course that used to be on the Boston Post Road in Westbrook, Connecticut, a beautiful postwar throwback with leisurely miniature fairways, the long holes sprawling over vast acreage ultimately far too valuable for the meager returns of $5 a putter. During the spring of my senior year of college I played there, soundly defeating my best friend and my girlfriend both—just recalling this in passing—on assignment for the New Haven Advocate. That’s right: “girlfriend.” “On assignment.” Look at this guy and how much he’d arrived. This was really the only kind of assignment I tended to draw. One time I was supposed to cover a press conference involving the mayor of Stamford and I was too scared to get out of my car.

On the scorecard the holes were neatly divided into a front nine and a back nine, looking every bit like a mix tape with two sides, nine songs each. I accepted the challenge and got cracking with “Dog Leg,” then later “Billiard,” “Lighthouse,” “Double Reverse,” “Windmill,” “Flower Hole,” “Treehouse.” But some of them (man, “Mole Hill”) were bad and I lost interest and never even got around to writing “Sea Gull,” “Double Trouble,” “Covered Bridge,” “School House,” “Looptie Loop,” “Seal,” “Under Hurdle,” “Sea World,” or “Red Barn.”

I was proud of “Dog Leg” at the time. It was one of the last songs I recorded in New Haven before abandoning the haunted house and moving to the city. I thought it had a good bridge. Also, I’d read somewhere that somebody famous used to record vocals in the bathroom, you know, for the reverb, and so that’s what I did, burgeoning pro that I was. I’d just been fired from the coffee shop for being an all-around bad employee: frequently late, sarcastic, and also not very good at making coffee-based beverages. The incident that galvanized my dismissal was getting caught selling a very old, fizzy-tasting mozzarella-and-tomato salad to a friend for less than I should have. On my way out the door, my boss, whom I decided to call Dog Leg here, told me I seemed like somebody she’d like to hang out with, just not have as an employee. I was like, Yeah, right, like I’ll hang out with you now.

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January 12, 2012

History Lesson: The Drapes Come Open, Revealing the Grand Ballroom

“The Drapes Come Open, Revealing the Grand Ballroom,” from The Envelope Pushes Back (2000)
There was a little man walking around the wedding wearing a huge tape recorder on his back. It was 1971 so the machine was not compact; he looked more like the plastic army man carrying the radio set, but substitute brown lace-ups and Dacron suit for combat boots and flak helmet. The straps from the tape recorder backpack make the brown jacket bunch up at the shoulders. The cuffs of his cream-colored dress shirt protrude two inches, three inches, four.

Although a stranger, the man was hired to be the wedding’s roving reporter, to interview all the principals, to document with his microphone every step of the reception from cocktails to cake. The recordings would be pressed to vinyl and the LPs presented as a six-record box set to the newlyweds. On their shelf, next to the soft-rock jams they would acquire over the rest of the decade, his work would look like an opera. The interviews went better and better as the night progressed. Proud parents and old grannies and next-door neighbors and one little kid he suspected may have been a little off. The happy, breathless bride and groom at the very end in the interest of dramatic timing. But it was in the opportunities to describe the scene, standing there alone and talking to himself, that he knew he really excelled:

And now something’s happening. The whole wall of red drapes across from the reception area has just started to come open from the bottom. An ever-increasing arc, rising, getting higher and wider, the opening revealing the wide expanses of a dining room: Didn’t even know it was there. A huge dining room, filled with tables with tiny, flickering candles among the flowers. Looking across, it looks almost like a castle ballroom. Way at the far end, we see Donna and Tom, embracing…

At least this is how I pictured it. This is from Seth’s parents’ wedding forty years ago; for their thirtieth anniversary, Seth asked if I would burn the old records to a CD for him. The technology was still new. It was 2000 so the machine was not compact. I listened to the entire thing as the snow swirled outside my Harlem sublet. I had just moved back to the city after a year in the margins of Westchester and New Jersey. In the former, ill-conceived attempts at cohabitation and a bracing lesson in what love was and wasn’t. In the latter, a self-imposed exile to my parents’ nest where eventually I healed well enough.

By the end of the recording I knew all the guests as well as anybody. I felt like family. Family surrounds us always. Didn’t even know it was there.

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December 15, 2011

The Reigning Sound, “If Christmas Can’t Bring You Home,” from Home for Orphans (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2005)

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December 15, 2011

Ooh, ooh, ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, yeah
Ooh, ooh, ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, yeah

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December 6, 2011

Dennis Linde, “Hello, I Am Your Heart,” from Dennis Linde (Elektra, 1973)

I picked up this LP cheap at the Record Exchange a few weeks ago, and in the itinerant days that have followed it’s been my top pick for the portable turntable: lush folk-pop-rock from the man who produced two albums out of Mickey Newbury’s celebrated “trilogy” (now handsomely reissued by Drag City). This record is weird—on this song, I love the ka-pow percussion, the flute synthesizer, the fuzz guitar, everything played by Linde (1943–2006) himself—but although he’s been described as “a mystery man,” he wasn’t a total outsider. He wrote a raft of great songs for everyone from Roger Miller to John Denver to the Dixie Chicks (including the sweet revenge fantasy “Goodbye Earl,” the video of which stars Dennis Franz and Jane Krakowski) and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, alongside Don and Phil Everly. I consider this all pretty impressive for a guy who had to set up his studio in the woods.

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November 30, 2011

Thunderegg at VCCA

Back from the Fletcher Tour, right in the middle of bringing the new record to the people, I’ve taken a quintessentially Eggish detour to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia, where until December 21 I’ll be working on still another facet of the Egg’s manifold rock plan: the Thunderegg History Lesson, formerly known as the Thunderbook.

1. New website
2. Release Platinum LP
3. Release Line Line
4. Promote items 1–3
5. Bring the Egg to the people
6. Thunderbook Thunderegg History Lesson
7. Thunderegg greatest-hits compilation (four-track era)
8. New batch of 14 tunes for February Album Writing Month
9. Blow everybody’s minds with the Line Line follow-up, C’mon Thunder (fall 2012)

Every working day, I’m sitting down at my desk and listening to the entire Thunderegg oeuvre (now 355 songs, not counting 102 outtakes) on shuffle. I write as I listen, trying to remember what things were like when each song was written. I think the song lyrics tell one part of the story, but there’s another narrative in there too, especially as the years go by. My job now is focusing on what, specifically, that larger narrative is. Personal definitions of success and failure? Finally not being a choirboy? The bittersweetness of missed connections, of losing people you love? Getting fucked up a lot? Whatever it is, soon there will be a new series of posts here. They’re going to be called Thunderegg History Lesson, and they’ll consist of an embedded Thunderegg song, drawn more or less at random from 1994 to 2011, along with some recollections. In time, these pieces will be stitched together to tell the stories of entire albums. Then I’m thinking that those larger stories can be stitched together to form a history of Thunderegg itself. That, of course, would be the Thunderbook. But I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. For now it’s just listening and remembering.

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November 20, 2011

And so ends Retourty 2011.

“Retarty,” Victoria House, Beaumont, TX, 11/10/11. Tommy O’Brien, drums. Huge thank you to the Fletcher C. Johnson Band for taking me on the road with them for the past two weeks.

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November 1, 2011

Thunderegg on No Pigeonholes Radio

Thunderegg on Don Campau’s No Pigeonholes Radio show
Tuesday nights throughout November, 8:00 P.M. PST

Don Campau is a legendary California DJ and musician who has been fighting for real underground music since 1969—his radio show on KKUP in Cupertino, begun in 1978 and named “No Pigeonholes” in 1985, was a hub of the cassette culture that flourished by word of mouth and through the mail in those days (and that certain hipsters today are eagerly attempting to resurrect, somewhat missing the point, by spending wads of cash on eBay for tapes of major-label albums). What’s even more cool is that for all his analog pedigree, Don has gone the high-tech route to continue to champion the weird, the lo-fi, the marginal, and the fiercely independent. His astonishing Living Archive of Underground Music, for instance, features loads of rips of otherwise absolutely unavailable 1980s and 1990s cassettes. Great stuff like this. And this. And this.

Along those lines, a version of No Pigeonholes is now broadcast every Tuesday at 8 P.M. PST through Berkeley’s underground-music stream LUVeR (that’s the Love Underground Visionary Revolution). And Thunderegg—whose first few albums were tapes, since CD-Rs weren’t readily available until The Envelope Pushes Back in 2000—is on the playlist throughout November. If you miss it this Tuesday, come back again next Tuesday. We’re proud to be a part of the show.

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October 22, 2011

Verve (pre- “the”), 1992

Verve, “One Way to Go” (live, fall 1992)

During what I’ve come to realize must have been CMJ in fall 1992, Chris and I met up in the city for two nights of musical mayhem. Friday was the Fontana Records showcase at…was there once a place called the Academy? The bill included Ocean Colour Scene, Catherine Wheel, and House of Love, whose latest album at the time, Babe Rainbow, remains to my mind one of the lost classics of nineties rock. Not that I was able to enjoy the show completely, having smoked my first- and last-ever Winston red down to the bone, attempting to mask the waft of my doobage, and awakened moments later on my back in the men’s room with three bouncers leaning in on me. Chris swept in just in time, taking me out for some air (as he hoisted me up, I saw myself literally green in the bathroom mirror), and then finding us a nice spot in the balcony where I could ride out the rest of the show like a feeb.

Saturday night we caught Eugenius at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, but back when they were still called Captain America. It was a great show, and in most historic retellings would rate as a typical man-they-were-so-awesome-we-were-THERE experience. Except the problem was that afterward, as fast as we tried to get back to Manhattan, all we caught of the next item on our list, Verve at CBGB, was the last song: We got there and Richard Ashcroft was on his damn knees on the stage as Nick McCabe’s laser guitar shot the whole, mostly empty place up. “Gravity Grave.” They hadn’t even put out an album yet, nobody in the U.S. had heard of them, but all summer Chris and I had been obsessed with their single “Man Called Sun,” pumping it in whichever mom car we were able to cop, cruising around Princeton, back and forth from the video store and the bowling alley and the shore.

One song. One song was all we saw, all so we could catch Captain America/Eugenius first. Not to dis “Buttermilk,” which would make it onto a few mixtapes, but Verve—they hadn’t been forced to add the definite article in front of their name yet—was the point of the whole weekend and ended up being one of my guiding-star bands throughout college, and I’d always wonder what the rest of that short set had been like. Until this week, when I came across a bootleg at the Princeton Record Exchange that claims to feature tunes “Live in New York & London 1992.” No other information is provided. And if I am to believe it is true, none further, really, is needed. I was right about Nick McCabe’s laser beams. I can close my eyes and I’m there.

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October 11, 2011

Sea Ray

Sea Ray (1997–2004) was a Brooklyn band at whose shows I could be counted upon to hoot out a “Whooo!” or two (and then to say, to whoever I was with, “You gotta go Whooo! every once in a while”). It was either that or clapping really loud while trying to hold your drink between your teeth, which by the end of the night would become challenging. That the six-piece group consisted of not just good friends but also my roommates (the family tree of 540 State Street will by necessity be the subject of a future post) was only half the story: They rocked. Not that it wasn’t fun to drink with them in the little curtained VIP area at the Bowery Ballroom after the show, but some of my most blissful moments with them came as I sat at the top of the basement stairs, listening to them practice on Sunday afternoons, when they didn’t know I was there. I miss Sea Ray. And so I was glad to see this video surface recently. Now I await the reunion.

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October 8, 2011

New Thunderegg Pricing Plan

When we rolled out the new Egg music store, our board of directors spent countless sleepless nights debating the proper pricing plan. They finally came up with fifty cents per song, which they argued was a lot cheaper than iTunes, and then, considering that most of the albums have 20+ songs, they came up with the discount rate of $5 for a whole album. It seemed reasonable, the board took the model to the shareholders, I…I mean the shareholders voted, and on September 1, 2011, the plan went into action.

Now, after observing the standard 37-day review of practices, I have determined that the plan is inadequate. Free the Egg. The shareholders fired the board. I fired the shareholders. Everybody’s out of work. And we shall move forward with a pay-what-you-want system for high-quality digital downloads of complete albums, which I suspected was what we should’ve had in the first place. Physical copies, which are charming and rare and require postage, still will cost you—and everybody really ought to own Open Book—but starting today you can name your price for fourteen years of Thunderegg albums, from Larry to Where Are the Cars. (That includes $0.00, you cheap bastards.) Pow(d)er to the people!

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