sunset like a nuclear death
Yes, this will be long and yes, this will be self indulgent. Welcome to the internet.
*****
I've been trying to go about this in the sanest way possible. In reality, I've been mourning the end of Ghost Runner for a while, seemingly much longer than anyone else, and so last night's Final Rehearsal Ever wasn't as emotionally draining as I'd anticipated. Still, our Final Show Ever on Friday night at Trash Bar will undoubtedly end in tears for all concerned, the way it did the last time we played a Last Show Ever in Austin (when I moved to New York). Still, this one is much more permanent. Sleazy leaves for Georgia next week, and what the future holds for Bug and I is a little up in the air, but it won't involved New York for much longer. Whatever that means. I've got a few years left in me.
*****
I'm not going to get into the whole huge enormous deal, the way I used to do on this journal, the way I would have done years ago, because I just don't have it in me. It's all over this blog anyway. Just Google "Christastrophe Ghost Runner" and you'll have hours and hours of fun. Trust me. It also helps to be up late, and drinking, and have the television on mute.
What's nuts to me, though, looking back, is just how prolific we were over the years and how many different musical roads we've been down. Somehow our weird lark for entertaining at a barbecue ended up playing and writing for ten years. TEN FUCKING YEARS. So, rather than do some big thing about "feelings", I'd rather just list all of our songs and talk about 'em. Like so:
1.Bad Girl
2.Radiator
We started out as a joke kind of thing. The almighty Ted Zizik had somehow talked the faculty at the UT Theatre department into paying for weekly barbecues (ostensibly for "morale" or something) and asked us to provide the entertainment. I don't think Sleazy even owned a bass at this point. We set up on the smoker's patio, next to the grill, and played twenty minutes of weird covers (opening with "Under Pressure", transitioning to some weird medley of every white rap song we would think of). This was the spring of 2000.
Anyway, those went well enough that then Maria Aladren asked us to play at the first benefit for our new theatre company, Pegasus 51/theatre. I wrote a few really easy punk-ish songs that, in my mind, leaned really heavy on Bowie but they totally didn't come out that way. We christened ourselves Fat Kids Screaming, which Donelan came up with, because he and Sleazy were watching a battle of the bands thing on MTV and the band My Gay Uncle came up, and Donelan said they were just a bunch of Fat Kids Screaming. Then the Austin Chronicle called us Rat Kids Screaming, which is a way better name.
These are the only two songs from that era I remember. My brother had joined at this point, and we had a pretty full set after a while. Oooh! "Love You Like a Broken Leg/Call Now (For Your Free Reading)"! Yeah, that one. I'm totally not re-numbering these. Bad Girl was about Sara shaving her head. Radiator was about getting wasted. Number one in a series.
3.In the Middle of the Ocean
4.Camilla's Lament
5.Portishead Screaming
6.The Song About Doing It
7.Glory to God, Oh!
8.Awake my Love
9.Camilla Dropped Into the Sea
10.Now We're in Hell
11.Anything But Soft
12.Exit Song (For a Musical)
Somewhere along the way I got the weird notion to write a punk rock musical set on a pirate ship, and decided that Fat Kids Screaming was perfect for it. I started writing it with Junebug, hammering out arrangements in his double-wide or at school if we could sneak away into an empty rehearsal room. After months of arranging and tedious rehearsal in Maria and Louis's living room, we had our first public performance at The Hideout for the 2000 Mind Over Money Festival. It was a primitive version of the show (I was still reading the script off a music stand) but it was out there. Thankfully, we had our friends in We Could Be Heroes in the audience, and they became eager supporters of the project. Six months later, we put up the full version for the 2001 Frontera Fest, which we then extended to a month-long stand at The Hideout.
We had a little mini fridge in the dressing room, which was always stocked with Lone Star tallboys. Shana eventually asked us to take the porn off the walls.
I've written about this a lot here, but I cannot overstate how much I love this show and how much it meant to create and perform it with my best friends. I've never been happier on a stage, and never been prouder of something I created. The fact that some people came to see it four or five times still just crushes me to this day. We struggled at first, but by the end we were playing to standing-room only crowds. In August we took the show on the road, playing at NYC Fringe 2001. Doing that show to a packed house in Richard Foreman's theater is still my absolute favorite moment I've ever had on a stage.
13.Goth Boy's Blues
14.Crime of the Century
15.Nuclear Death
16.Top of the World
17.Tom Waits is Dead (Sinners and Saints)
I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and spent a few years dragging my acoustic guitar with me all over the city, playing a bunch of shows at places like Sidewalk Cafe with my new cohorts Jeremy Newman and Juliet Schaefer. Sleazy moved up in 2003 and we quickly set about writing a new little batch of songs, anticipating Bug's eventual move in 2004. Any time we drink we will tell you about our Great Grand Legendary Benders where, with both of us on unemployment, we spent all day drinking cheap beer, smoking cigarettes, and arranging songs.
Our first New York show was a party at the McKibbin Lofts arranged by one Kelly Irene Corson. Sleazy recruited a cook at his restaurant to play drums, and he ended up burning the shit out of his hand at work and playing with huge bandages. We called ourselves Sex Brigade, which kept getting bounced by e-mail profanity filters, so we went ahead and called ourselves Shit Brigade. We played larval versions of eventual Ghost Runner songs, and during 'The Drugs That Ate My Brain' I caught the eye of a beautiful redhead who was really into the set. We got married three years later.
That first drummer disappeared out of nowhere, as did a replacement who ditched us a few hours before our next show (also set up by Kelly). We eventually renamed ourselves Ghost Runner and recorded an EP with Matt Crawford on drums, who we'd found on Craig's List for a one-off Johnny Cash tribute night.
They were all new songs except for Tom Waits, which we'd kicked around a bit in Austin. Somewhere Craig Kotfas has an old recording of us jamming it out on acoustic guitars at Sean Hill's place. Don't know why I keep thinking of that but I do.
Junebug finally moved up and we played our first show at Arelene's Grocery in August of 2004. We hit the ground running, and started playing all over the city while drinking it all away at Flatplex. These were good days. These were the best days.
18.Hipsters Kill My Enthusiasm
19.The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre
20.If It Wasn't for the Whiskey
21.March of the Degenerates
22.Homework Machine
23.Len Bias is Waiting in the Wings
24.Simmer Down (Walk to the Moon)
25.When All the Goth Girls Started Dancing
26.Mournfully Yours
We started writing at a record clip, and by the time we did our residency at The Cave in Long Island City we had about three hours of material to cull from. We never had a set list; just called out songs on the stage. Years of playing together had pretty much made us telepathic, anyway. None of those songs up there ever made it to an "official" recording, but we have live versions of a few pulled from the board at CBGB. I loved those shows.
We wrote Degenerates in Sleazy's room while recovering from an insane party at the Plex. Whiskey was one of the first songs, as was Homework Machine (Junebug hated that song, so we finally dropped it from the set after much deliberation). I most regret never getting a single recording of Simmer Down, which became one of my favorites (even though the first time I showed it to them I apologized for how bad it ripped off the Pixies. We didn't care after a while, and it morphed into something different anyway.)
Those last two songs are actually joke songs from the one night we played a goth show as The Mope at PS 122. I count them because they fucking rule.
27.Running Start
28.Coming/Going
29.The Drugs That Ate My Brain
30.Pins in Your Wings
31.Spring Redux
32.Somebody Call a Cop
33.Whistler's Mother
I don't remember exactly when we started recording "The Distance Immeasurable", but it ended up taking us almost two years to finally release it in early 2007. We were constantly delayed by money problems and lack of availability, plus just random issues in the studio with re-recording parts and all the weird overdubs. It's a pretty great little record, but in no way does justice to our big fiery live sets. I always regretted that we could never get a good recording of any of those later shows. Sleazy and I were talking about our favorite shows we've played, and most of them came from this era when we were insanely tight and the songs had taken on a new kind of fury. Remember that one show at The Cave where we were basically on Mars the whole time? Or the time the A/C broke at Trash and we played to a hallucinating crowd of drunks with heat exhaustion? Great fucking times.
34.Wonder Woman
35.Whistler's Revenge
36.Lost Underwater (The Fun Song)
37.The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
38.My Radio Show
By the end of 2007 we were all kind of splintering off and Ghost Runner slowly became less and less of a priority. Junebug's work schedule was increasingly taking precedence, as was Sleazy's work with The Gulf of Michigan. We started taking months off in between gigs and didn't really rehearse much anymore.
After a while, Sleazy and I formed Spaniard with Caleb and John (who we met on Craig's List) because I was just losing it from not playing any shows. But I missed Ghost Runner and playing with Bug, so we set up weekly rehearsals with both bands. We never really said out loud at any point that Ghost Runner wouldn't be playing shows anymore, so we kept writing, eventually adding Florian on bass while Sleazy and I kept our new co-lead-guitar set up from Spaniard.
Those five songs up there made their debut at a gig a few months ago at the Delancey, the only real public airing they got (we did a disastrous show at Crash Mansion a week later, which Junebug had to drop out of at the last minute thanks to a bout with the flu. Drummer-less rock shows are no fun). Those five are the best of the batch, but I've got hours and hours of tape of at least another dozen songs that will probably find a home one place or another.
So that's that. I've probably left off a ton of songs that i can't even remember now, to say nothing of all the covers we regularly played that I love (Bie Mir Bis Du Schoen!). We play our last show together on Friday night at Trash Bar, where we've played dozens of times over the past few years with various bands, and it'll be a right fitting whiskey and tear-soaked send off. And from there, who knows? All I know is that Spaniard, in one form or another, is carrying on and I'm excited about the possibilities.
Ah well. At least we're splitting up for purely logistical purposes. It's not like we hate each other or can't play music with each other any more. Just gonna live in different cities for a while. This isn't GOODBYE FOREVER or anything. It's not easy, to be sure, but it's also just a new path. This isn't the last time I'm ever playing with these two guys, because you never know when we'll all find ourselves in the same room at the same time again. But these will have to be special occasions, years from now, with a bunch of kids in tow.
Anyway, Friday will be fun, but we had our real send-off last night, just the three of us, playing songs from all over this list, from all the Way Back When, and laughing about how awesome we are. You can't cheat this, you can't fake it. Time is the only thing that does this. Lots of time and lots of love. So much love you don't even know.
Click here for a playlist of most of these songs.
(Oh, Christ, it looks like Imeem got eaten up by MySpace or something. LAME. LAME LAME LAME. I loved imeem. And I just uploaded about 30 Ghost Runner songs, so lets see where those end up. Bastards.)
*****
I've been trying to go about this in the sanest way possible. In reality, I've been mourning the end of Ghost Runner for a while, seemingly much longer than anyone else, and so last night's Final Rehearsal Ever wasn't as emotionally draining as I'd anticipated. Still, our Final Show Ever on Friday night at Trash Bar will undoubtedly end in tears for all concerned, the way it did the last time we played a Last Show Ever in Austin (when I moved to New York). Still, this one is much more permanent. Sleazy leaves for Georgia next week, and what the future holds for Bug and I is a little up in the air, but it won't involved New York for much longer. Whatever that means. I've got a few years left in me.
*****
I'm not going to get into the whole huge enormous deal, the way I used to do on this journal, the way I would have done years ago, because I just don't have it in me. It's all over this blog anyway. Just Google "Christastrophe Ghost Runner" and you'll have hours and hours of fun. Trust me. It also helps to be up late, and drinking, and have the television on mute.
What's nuts to me, though, looking back, is just how prolific we were over the years and how many different musical roads we've been down. Somehow our weird lark for entertaining at a barbecue ended up playing and writing for ten years. TEN FUCKING YEARS. So, rather than do some big thing about "feelings", I'd rather just list all of our songs and talk about 'em. Like so:
1.Bad Girl
2.Radiator
We started out as a joke kind of thing. The almighty Ted Zizik had somehow talked the faculty at the UT Theatre department into paying for weekly barbecues (ostensibly for "morale" or something) and asked us to provide the entertainment. I don't think Sleazy even owned a bass at this point. We set up on the smoker's patio, next to the grill, and played twenty minutes of weird covers (opening with "Under Pressure", transitioning to some weird medley of every white rap song we would think of). This was the spring of 2000.
Anyway, those went well enough that then Maria Aladren asked us to play at the first benefit for our new theatre company, Pegasus 51/theatre. I wrote a few really easy punk-ish songs that, in my mind, leaned really heavy on Bowie but they totally didn't come out that way. We christened ourselves Fat Kids Screaming, which Donelan came up with, because he and Sleazy were watching a battle of the bands thing on MTV and the band My Gay Uncle came up, and Donelan said they were just a bunch of Fat Kids Screaming. Then the Austin Chronicle called us Rat Kids Screaming, which is a way better name.
These are the only two songs from that era I remember. My brother had joined at this point, and we had a pretty full set after a while. Oooh! "Love You Like a Broken Leg/Call Now (For Your Free Reading)"! Yeah, that one. I'm totally not re-numbering these. Bad Girl was about Sara shaving her head. Radiator was about getting wasted. Number one in a series.
3.In the Middle of the Ocean
4.Camilla's Lament
5.Portishead Screaming
6.The Song About Doing It
7.Glory to God, Oh!
8.Awake my Love
9.Camilla Dropped Into the Sea
10.Now We're in Hell
11.Anything But Soft
12.Exit Song (For a Musical)
Somewhere along the way I got the weird notion to write a punk rock musical set on a pirate ship, and decided that Fat Kids Screaming was perfect for it. I started writing it with Junebug, hammering out arrangements in his double-wide or at school if we could sneak away into an empty rehearsal room. After months of arranging and tedious rehearsal in Maria and Louis's living room, we had our first public performance at The Hideout for the 2000 Mind Over Money Festival. It was a primitive version of the show (I was still reading the script off a music stand) but it was out there. Thankfully, we had our friends in We Could Be Heroes in the audience, and they became eager supporters of the project. Six months later, we put up the full version for the 2001 Frontera Fest, which we then extended to a month-long stand at The Hideout.
We had a little mini fridge in the dressing room, which was always stocked with Lone Star tallboys. Shana eventually asked us to take the porn off the walls.
I've written about this a lot here, but I cannot overstate how much I love this show and how much it meant to create and perform it with my best friends. I've never been happier on a stage, and never been prouder of something I created. The fact that some people came to see it four or five times still just crushes me to this day. We struggled at first, but by the end we were playing to standing-room only crowds. In August we took the show on the road, playing at NYC Fringe 2001. Doing that show to a packed house in Richard Foreman's theater is still my absolute favorite moment I've ever had on a stage.
13.Goth Boy's Blues
14.Crime of the Century
15.Nuclear Death
16.Top of the World
17.Tom Waits is Dead (Sinners and Saints)
I moved to New York in the summer of 2001 and spent a few years dragging my acoustic guitar with me all over the city, playing a bunch of shows at places like Sidewalk Cafe with my new cohorts Jeremy Newman and Juliet Schaefer. Sleazy moved up in 2003 and we quickly set about writing a new little batch of songs, anticipating Bug's eventual move in 2004. Any time we drink we will tell you about our Great Grand Legendary Benders where, with both of us on unemployment, we spent all day drinking cheap beer, smoking cigarettes, and arranging songs.
Our first New York show was a party at the McKibbin Lofts arranged by one Kelly Irene Corson. Sleazy recruited a cook at his restaurant to play drums, and he ended up burning the shit out of his hand at work and playing with huge bandages. We called ourselves Sex Brigade, which kept getting bounced by e-mail profanity filters, so we went ahead and called ourselves Shit Brigade. We played larval versions of eventual Ghost Runner songs, and during 'The Drugs That Ate My Brain' I caught the eye of a beautiful redhead who was really into the set. We got married three years later.
That first drummer disappeared out of nowhere, as did a replacement who ditched us a few hours before our next show (also set up by Kelly). We eventually renamed ourselves Ghost Runner and recorded an EP with Matt Crawford on drums, who we'd found on Craig's List for a one-off Johnny Cash tribute night.
They were all new songs except for Tom Waits, which we'd kicked around a bit in Austin. Somewhere Craig Kotfas has an old recording of us jamming it out on acoustic guitars at Sean Hill's place. Don't know why I keep thinking of that but I do.
Junebug finally moved up and we played our first show at Arelene's Grocery in August of 2004. We hit the ground running, and started playing all over the city while drinking it all away at Flatplex. These were good days. These were the best days.
18.Hipsters Kill My Enthusiasm
19.The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre
20.If It Wasn't for the Whiskey
21.March of the Degenerates
22.Homework Machine
23.Len Bias is Waiting in the Wings
24.Simmer Down (Walk to the Moon)
25.When All the Goth Girls Started Dancing
26.Mournfully Yours
We started writing at a record clip, and by the time we did our residency at The Cave in Long Island City we had about three hours of material to cull from. We never had a set list; just called out songs on the stage. Years of playing together had pretty much made us telepathic, anyway. None of those songs up there ever made it to an "official" recording, but we have live versions of a few pulled from the board at CBGB. I loved those shows.
We wrote Degenerates in Sleazy's room while recovering from an insane party at the Plex. Whiskey was one of the first songs, as was Homework Machine (Junebug hated that song, so we finally dropped it from the set after much deliberation). I most regret never getting a single recording of Simmer Down, which became one of my favorites (even though the first time I showed it to them I apologized for how bad it ripped off the Pixies. We didn't care after a while, and it morphed into something different anyway.)
Those last two songs are actually joke songs from the one night we played a goth show as The Mope at PS 122. I count them because they fucking rule.
27.Running Start
28.Coming/Going
29.The Drugs That Ate My Brain
30.Pins in Your Wings
31.Spring Redux
32.Somebody Call a Cop
33.Whistler's Mother
I don't remember exactly when we started recording "The Distance Immeasurable", but it ended up taking us almost two years to finally release it in early 2007. We were constantly delayed by money problems and lack of availability, plus just random issues in the studio with re-recording parts and all the weird overdubs. It's a pretty great little record, but in no way does justice to our big fiery live sets. I always regretted that we could never get a good recording of any of those later shows. Sleazy and I were talking about our favorite shows we've played, and most of them came from this era when we were insanely tight and the songs had taken on a new kind of fury. Remember that one show at The Cave where we were basically on Mars the whole time? Or the time the A/C broke at Trash and we played to a hallucinating crowd of drunks with heat exhaustion? Great fucking times.
34.Wonder Woman
35.Whistler's Revenge
36.Lost Underwater (The Fun Song)
37.The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
38.My Radio Show
By the end of 2007 we were all kind of splintering off and Ghost Runner slowly became less and less of a priority. Junebug's work schedule was increasingly taking precedence, as was Sleazy's work with The Gulf of Michigan. We started taking months off in between gigs and didn't really rehearse much anymore.
After a while, Sleazy and I formed Spaniard with Caleb and John (who we met on Craig's List) because I was just losing it from not playing any shows. But I missed Ghost Runner and playing with Bug, so we set up weekly rehearsals with both bands. We never really said out loud at any point that Ghost Runner wouldn't be playing shows anymore, so we kept writing, eventually adding Florian on bass while Sleazy and I kept our new co-lead-guitar set up from Spaniard.
Those five songs up there made their debut at a gig a few months ago at the Delancey, the only real public airing they got (we did a disastrous show at Crash Mansion a week later, which Junebug had to drop out of at the last minute thanks to a bout with the flu. Drummer-less rock shows are no fun). Those five are the best of the batch, but I've got hours and hours of tape of at least another dozen songs that will probably find a home one place or another.
So that's that. I've probably left off a ton of songs that i can't even remember now, to say nothing of all the covers we regularly played that I love (Bie Mir Bis Du Schoen!). We play our last show together on Friday night at Trash Bar, where we've played dozens of times over the past few years with various bands, and it'll be a right fitting whiskey and tear-soaked send off. And from there, who knows? All I know is that Spaniard, in one form or another, is carrying on and I'm excited about the possibilities.
Ah well. At least we're splitting up for purely logistical purposes. It's not like we hate each other or can't play music with each other any more. Just gonna live in different cities for a while. This isn't GOODBYE FOREVER or anything. It's not easy, to be sure, but it's also just a new path. This isn't the last time I'm ever playing with these two guys, because you never know when we'll all find ourselves in the same room at the same time again. But these will have to be special occasions, years from now, with a bunch of kids in tow.
Anyway, Friday will be fun, but we had our real send-off last night, just the three of us, playing songs from all over this list, from all the Way Back When, and laughing about how awesome we are. You can't cheat this, you can't fake it. Time is the only thing that does this. Lots of time and lots of love. So much love you don't even know.
Click here for a playlist of most of these songs.
(Oh, Christ, it looks like Imeem got eaten up by MySpace or something. LAME. LAME LAME LAME. I loved imeem. And I just uploaded about 30 Ghost Runner songs, so lets see where those end up. Bastards.)