grandiose echoes: my graduate thesis in its entirety
since i'm jobless and ceaselessly working to finish our tour (i'll post dates when i knock off one of the now 3.5 open dates)...i figured what better time to post the 40+ pages of my senior thesis. i don't expect anyone to actually finish it, but maybe you'll be entertained by a part. there's a table of contents and everything. anyways, it's a creative look at my time in a band that seems much different from most of the music world around it, a story of my shared experiences as part of something that, while beyond myself, has doubtlessly affected who i am and how i live my life.
so...here it is...behind the cut. [edit: the post was too large. does anyone know if you can override that with code? so i posted the first 'chapter' and will post the rest serial-style.]
Grandiose Echoes
Deconstructing Rock and Roll
Drew DeBoy
HONRS 499
Thesis Advisor: Mark Neely
5 May 2006
Table of Contents
Prologue - 3
Epic Shit, Man - 4
No Control - 13
Nothing Matters, Dude - 21
Used Up, Burnt Out - 29
Ever-Present Buzz - 35
Prologue
Everything, Now! has played in Muncie fourty-four times over the previous two-and-a-half years, building a following from scratch. Over this time period, I suppose we’ve become somewhat of a minor musical sensation, regularly drawing crowds of 150 or more. On campus, I’m often recognized not by my name, but my identity of being in the band. I’ve done more in the band than I probably ever would have achieved musically by myself-two records so far, three tours, countless shows and interviews. What is written here is an account of those experiences-not a summary, because that would be way too long and uninteresting, but a series of essays deglamorizing the often mythic, mystic concept of “the band.” What is here is honest and true, a series of interconnected moments that show how much the band has affected my life, and how my life has affected the band.
Epic Shit, Man
525 North Wheeling Avenue was the Muncie home-base of Everything, Now! for two years. For years “the 525” had been home to artists, musicians, slackers, anarchists, computer nerds, alcoholics, stoners, and general twenty-something disillusioned anti-hipsters. Upstairs was a three-bedroom apartment, in which Dan, Crafty, and Doog, three band members, all lived, though never all at the same time. We practiced in an upstairs bedroom until the floor threatened to cave in from the weight of six guys with equipment, and the window was busted out by an errant drumstick. Downstairs, there was communal couch-space for bands passing through and drunks passing out; three bedrooms with 12-foot ceilings and decaying molding; a filthy kitchen with communal food shelves with mostly dumpstered food; a large glass table decked with past-date pies and brownies, cats’ food, and bill notices; and a refrigerator usually filled with expired juices, quickly-softening produce, and large volumes of High Life or Pabst. The house was a failed experiment in communal living, the rules binding its residents to cleaning schedules and food sharing had decayed into several shouting matches, residents pissing on each others’ bikes, and dishes being thrown into the yard. The lone remainder of the attempted idealism was the weekly Food Not Bombs meetings, which usually consisted of several pounds of stir fry served in bowls along with whatever breads and sweets the dumpsters behind Marsh could provide.
The basement was a mass of shoddy bunk beds, bold blue tarps separating two of the “rooms,” piles of amps, pieces of several P.A. systems, broken cords, outlets packed full of power strips, drum skeletons, carpet fragments, and a rusty tank of a furnace. The pipes in the ceiling began leaking bits of sewage halfway through the band’s tenure, which gave the entire place an odor stuck between a dirty bathroom and a zoo. The stairs down to the basement were narrow, making it impossible for even the skinniest pair of guitar-wielding vegans to haul an amp or head up side-by-side.
The house next door had been condemned for several years, and after break-ins by 525 residents, was purportedly in better condition than the 525 itself. The power was spotty in the basement, often interrupting practices or providing smoke breaks. Still, there were benefits to practicing in such a pit. Well, really just one. Noise laws didn’t really apply to the 525, since the basement was low enough to prevent most sound from escaping its earthy grasp. You could practice at any time of day or night as long as there were enough members to convince the residents.
In the fall of 2005, only three adventurous residents would sign the lease to continue renting the 525. Eventually, they had to move out due to ever-decaying conditions, escalating rent, and the realization that they were living in a cesspool with walls and running water. The house was subsequently condemned, something we had joked about in-between power outages and stepping on shit-soaked rugs. In July, though we didn’t know it then, we played the last show ever hosted by the 525, on a night when at 10pm the temperature still hovered around 85 degrees, the humidity near 100 percent. The show was an explosion of sweat, shirtless bodies, forty-ounce bottles, and countless bum-jugs of Carlo Rossi. When the last note buzzed out, we stumbled away from the broken drum set and dissolving jingle sticks, up the stairs into a muddy yard filled with slurred voices and cricket calls.
When people ask what Everything, Now! sounds like-I have a couple stock responses based on their looks. If they’re aged, well-tanned and wearing a polo shirt, or think art is that Thomas Kinkade hanging in the doctor’s office, that the new Ashley Simpson single isn’t just contrived bullshit created to replicate a white suburban girl’s fantasy of what “rebellion is,” then I tell them it’s “rock and roll.” To the more astute, the kid in fitted jeans, or the short-haired girl in glasses and Chuck Taylors, I may say “indie rock” or “indie rock with keyboards and bells” or “epic shit, man.” The 525 is an accurate metaphor for the sound of Everything, Now!-even our name sometimes seems to be a reflection of that past residence, whether its the number and types of people that paid rent there, or the types of food Dan, the original drummer, would coat sloppily with ranch dressing. Everything, Now! incorporates a diverse set of often dissonant, opposite influences. In a given song you may hear the grandiose echoes of David Bowie, drum circles of Afrobeat, the wall of noise of a shitty gutter-punk band playing through shredded speakers, the intense, detail-focused micro-percussion of Brian Wilson, even the glitter and fade of the modern ambient noise movement.
Live, the band is a different monster, but like the house we came to band-hood in, full of a punk rock ethos. The songs are extremely loud and are structurally flexible, to allow occasional free-form interpretation. On-stage, instruments and members are strewn haphazardly across the stage or floor, our soulful but cool demeanor the result of long hours of practice, the constant rehearsals even an hour or two before scheduled show-time. Like the 525, we’re a mix of high ideals and punk aesthetic, a blender of precision and chaos, an ear-blistering ball of energy always ready to disintegrate, but retaining enough control to reel in each song.
It wasn’t always that way, and the birth of the band didn’t even take place in the wet, warm womb of the 525, but in Athens, Georgia, where guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Jon (known to everyone but his parents and girlfriend as Crafty) was born. He began writing songs for what would become the band while he worked graveyard shift at a gas station in Indianapolis, where he had moved after high school graduation to pursue love, not music. For the same reason, he soon moved up to Muncie where he started a project with the other three original members, Rob, Dan, and Ben, calling it The Grand Opening. The foursome’s first show took place on an icy January night in 2003 at a local punk rock bar called the Speakeasy. In its infancy, The Grand Opening was showing signs of the psychedelic, multi-media project that it would eventually become. Accompanying the band on the tiny stage was a three-foot tall purple and red, wire and papier-mâché octopus, complete with eight tentacles. Above them was a green banner with decorative trumpets read “The Grand Opening,” and on each side of the stage was a TV/VCR stack playing loops of old cartoons, public service announcements, and 70s-era educational programming.
At the very first show I was immediately drawn in to the artistic production of the band as a whole-in addition to the interesting songwriting, which rarely fell into a verse-chorus-verse format. Being good friends with Ben, and having been acquainted with the rest, I went to many early shows, and when Ben moved to Indianapolis the following fall, I told Rob, “Hey, I’ve seen you guys enough to fill in for Ben at practice.”
This was a lie. I couldn’t play any instruments at the time, and had no more knowledge of notes and scales than I did of nuclear physics. Within a week, I was called to practice. Before leaving my dorm room, I was nervous about being found out as a fake, a phony. I’ll get there and not be able to play a single instrument and they’ll laugh until I walk home, I thought. Crafty didn’t ask me what I knew, however, just began teaching. The first song I learned, “I am Trying to Break Your Neck,” would have been easy for me to play on the glockenspiel with a spine injury. I picked it up quickly, because, honestly, a five-year-old probably could have played “D (pause) - C - B - A” with as much ease. I also played some toy percussion instruments, and began to think that international trade laws were the only thing preventing an untrained monkey from taking my place. The second song, “Bowel Sonata,” only required me to learn three or four chords on the piano, and really, I just memorized the key combinations, marking them with duct tape on the Roland keyboard. After learning this song, Crafty’s girlfriend, Abby, said, “I think Drew should join the band.” I looked up, and the rest of them said, “Yeah, okay.” That was that. I was in.
My first show, the band’s first under the name Everything, Now! (a performer in Chicago threatened legal action for using the name “The Grand Opening”) was in two days. The new name was chosen to reflect our sound, an amalgamation of a thousand influences, and to take a shot at American culture, the bloated material-oriented society we’re surrounded by. I remember little from the first show except that, after the two songs I had learned were over, we decided that I’d sit next to the TV we had on-stage, and pretend like I was watching a movie for the rest of the set, looking bored and pensive. Meanwhile, the rest of the original line-up- Crafty on lead guitar and vocals, Rob on bass, Dan on drums, and Ben on rhythm guitar and bells, played through a solid but tame set.
Shortly after I joined the band, we self-released several hundred copies of our first record, Sunshine of Doom. Complete with psychedelic hand-drawn cover art of a monkey in the lotus position atop a pyramid, its muddy, 8-track lo-fi sound (recorded mostly in the upstairs of the 525) came out in December of 2003. At a show in January 2004 in which the band debuted new material, the owners of Standard Recording Company, a small record label then based out of Kokomo took interest in the band. The show was in a dirty Muncie basement, filled with people who had come out to see if we were as awful as our first review stated, out that week in a Ball State newsmagazine. “This CD isn’t even good enough to level the uneven fourth leg of a rickety table,” the reviewer had said, “It sounds like it was recorded in a funeral parlor at the bottom of a bottomless hole.” Kevin, Evan, and Mark, the three burly, bearded men of Standard Recording, saw us play live quite a few times that winter, apparently loved the “funeral parlor” sound, and by May, we had signed a recording contract and begun work on our second album, which was to be called Police, Police!
Despite a small recording contract, the band remained largely DIY (do-it-yourself), producing almost all of its art, helping out with much of the recording process, booking our own shows and eventually, tours. Inside the band, this is a source of pride, something we can look back on and say, “We did that ourselves, didn’t have to suck up to anybody.” Doing almost everything ourselves helped to keep us independent, which in turn allowed us creative control over anything we were producing artistically. In a way, this is why the band comes off as a collective rather than just a band, as it’s not just the music we’re creating, but packaging, advertising, shirts, books, and various side projects. The attitude is also an outgrowth of our sound, or at least correlates closely to our sonic intentions. We don’t have glossy business cards, expensive t-shirts, an image, or a sound we are trying to fit into. Patches, t-shirts, and early on, CD cases were all hand-made, partially because we’re usually broke, partially because we all believe in the art and energy of the process.
The spring and summer of 2004 was spent recording Police, Police! in the basement of the 525, which was then being used by recording engineer Tyler Watkins as the base of his operations. Police, Police! was a much more fleshed-out sound than its predecessor, as Crafty’s songwriting ethos here was to fit as much as possible onto each song, a la Sgt. Pepper’s or Brian Wilson’s lost album Smile. Some songs on the album were mixed from over 100 separate tracks, including smashing glass, toy marimbas, roomfuls of handclaps, bubbles, found sound samples, remixed classical tunes, and an army of other noises. All of the combinations of sound to produce these rock songs was almost a flexing of creative muscle by Crafty, the lead songwriter, wanting to fit as many separate ideas into a song without it sounding weighed down, or heavy. The record shows this, as the songs are deceptively complex, the multitudes of different noise tracks smoothed over by the sheer catchiness of the songs. The recording process was arduous, dealing with an engineer who loved to tinker, and was in the midst of moving his studio to a different city. Money coming from Standard was also scarce, so convincing Tyler to work for free was an added difficulty. Our sessions often started early in the afternoon and went late into many spring and summer evenings throughout 2004.
Ben’s last shows with the band came after recording finished in August 2004, a sweaty long weekend we spent in Illinois. The first night was at Chicago’s renowned Empty Bottle, where Standard attracted a modest crowd by providing a keg’s worth of free beer. The next night was spent at Nargile’s, a velvet-covered hookah bar in Champaign, and was attended by exactly five people. Two were a couple, a dour looking husband and wife who had played before us, and stood near the soundboard in their khakis looking like laid-off high-school hall monitors. The third was a piss-drunk local, who flitted between stage and bar constantly, the fourth was my older brother, along for the ride, and the fifth was the sound guy, whose real job was playing shitty music during intermissions. We played a loud and brash set, ending with a ten-minute noise freak-out, during which Ben turned off his amp, and Rob threw himself to the ground in a faux-seizure, shattering a pint glass with his jerking foot. Crafty wailed on a saxophone until he couldn’t breathe. Dan stumbled off-stage the moment he stopped playing, completely trashed.
We waited in the parking lot for Dan to stop puking in the bathroom, and for our four dollars from the door. We left the show with only our equipment and a penis gun that Rob bought at a nearby adult bookstore. He kept clapping the pink plastic balls together, shooting the shaft of the gun at Ben’s face. Had Rob known this would be Ben’s last show, I can only imagine he would have done worse. We drove home that night, and I never thought of a failed show like that as paying your dues, the sweat, puke, and fake penises that are required before you start to leave your mark, however temporal, on a music world in Indiana that matters little in the grand picture of light-shows, hair-dos, six-figure recording advances. We were striving towards something we couldn’t know or recognize, that we worried we couldn’t achieve-like the hallway in horror movies or nightmares that keeps extending in front of your eyes, pushing toward a distant door through the thick white walls and light. I realized later that the glamour of a band doesn’t come from playing packed clubs or sold-out art centers, but lies instead in its own energetic output. This energy was cumulative, something you had to build up every night, no matter if there were fifty people or five. That weekend was the start, earmarked by a review the piss-drunk local sent us a few weeks later, a paper he had turned in describing our show as “the best he’d ever seen.” From this moment, we were like traveling evangelists, spreading the word five people at a time, whether in basements, coffeeshops, or living rooms.
I wasn’t okay with it yet.
i'll try to post more about my move and other things as time allows. hope somebody digs this, and let me know what yall think about anything from a single line to a storyline to the whole thing. eventually hope to work to expand this.
so...here it is...behind the cut. [edit: the post was too large. does anyone know if you can override that with code? so i posted the first 'chapter' and will post the rest serial-style.]
Grandiose Echoes
Deconstructing Rock and Roll
Drew DeBoy
HONRS 499
Thesis Advisor: Mark Neely
5 May 2006
Table of Contents
Prologue - 3
Epic Shit, Man - 4
No Control - 13
Nothing Matters, Dude - 21
Used Up, Burnt Out - 29
Ever-Present Buzz - 35
Prologue
Everything, Now! has played in Muncie fourty-four times over the previous two-and-a-half years, building a following from scratch. Over this time period, I suppose we’ve become somewhat of a minor musical sensation, regularly drawing crowds of 150 or more. On campus, I’m often recognized not by my name, but my identity of being in the band. I’ve done more in the band than I probably ever would have achieved musically by myself-two records so far, three tours, countless shows and interviews. What is written here is an account of those experiences-not a summary, because that would be way too long and uninteresting, but a series of essays deglamorizing the often mythic, mystic concept of “the band.” What is here is honest and true, a series of interconnected moments that show how much the band has affected my life, and how my life has affected the band.
Epic Shit, Man
525 North Wheeling Avenue was the Muncie home-base of Everything, Now! for two years. For years “the 525” had been home to artists, musicians, slackers, anarchists, computer nerds, alcoholics, stoners, and general twenty-something disillusioned anti-hipsters. Upstairs was a three-bedroom apartment, in which Dan, Crafty, and Doog, three band members, all lived, though never all at the same time. We practiced in an upstairs bedroom until the floor threatened to cave in from the weight of six guys with equipment, and the window was busted out by an errant drumstick. Downstairs, there was communal couch-space for bands passing through and drunks passing out; three bedrooms with 12-foot ceilings and decaying molding; a filthy kitchen with communal food shelves with mostly dumpstered food; a large glass table decked with past-date pies and brownies, cats’ food, and bill notices; and a refrigerator usually filled with expired juices, quickly-softening produce, and large volumes of High Life or Pabst. The house was a failed experiment in communal living, the rules binding its residents to cleaning schedules and food sharing had decayed into several shouting matches, residents pissing on each others’ bikes, and dishes being thrown into the yard. The lone remainder of the attempted idealism was the weekly Food Not Bombs meetings, which usually consisted of several pounds of stir fry served in bowls along with whatever breads and sweets the dumpsters behind Marsh could provide.
The basement was a mass of shoddy bunk beds, bold blue tarps separating two of the “rooms,” piles of amps, pieces of several P.A. systems, broken cords, outlets packed full of power strips, drum skeletons, carpet fragments, and a rusty tank of a furnace. The pipes in the ceiling began leaking bits of sewage halfway through the band’s tenure, which gave the entire place an odor stuck between a dirty bathroom and a zoo. The stairs down to the basement were narrow, making it impossible for even the skinniest pair of guitar-wielding vegans to haul an amp or head up side-by-side.
The house next door had been condemned for several years, and after break-ins by 525 residents, was purportedly in better condition than the 525 itself. The power was spotty in the basement, often interrupting practices or providing smoke breaks. Still, there were benefits to practicing in such a pit. Well, really just one. Noise laws didn’t really apply to the 525, since the basement was low enough to prevent most sound from escaping its earthy grasp. You could practice at any time of day or night as long as there were enough members to convince the residents.
In the fall of 2005, only three adventurous residents would sign the lease to continue renting the 525. Eventually, they had to move out due to ever-decaying conditions, escalating rent, and the realization that they were living in a cesspool with walls and running water. The house was subsequently condemned, something we had joked about in-between power outages and stepping on shit-soaked rugs. In July, though we didn’t know it then, we played the last show ever hosted by the 525, on a night when at 10pm the temperature still hovered around 85 degrees, the humidity near 100 percent. The show was an explosion of sweat, shirtless bodies, forty-ounce bottles, and countless bum-jugs of Carlo Rossi. When the last note buzzed out, we stumbled away from the broken drum set and dissolving jingle sticks, up the stairs into a muddy yard filled with slurred voices and cricket calls.
When people ask what Everything, Now! sounds like-I have a couple stock responses based on their looks. If they’re aged, well-tanned and wearing a polo shirt, or think art is that Thomas Kinkade hanging in the doctor’s office, that the new Ashley Simpson single isn’t just contrived bullshit created to replicate a white suburban girl’s fantasy of what “rebellion is,” then I tell them it’s “rock and roll.” To the more astute, the kid in fitted jeans, or the short-haired girl in glasses and Chuck Taylors, I may say “indie rock” or “indie rock with keyboards and bells” or “epic shit, man.” The 525 is an accurate metaphor for the sound of Everything, Now!-even our name sometimes seems to be a reflection of that past residence, whether its the number and types of people that paid rent there, or the types of food Dan, the original drummer, would coat sloppily with ranch dressing. Everything, Now! incorporates a diverse set of often dissonant, opposite influences. In a given song you may hear the grandiose echoes of David Bowie, drum circles of Afrobeat, the wall of noise of a shitty gutter-punk band playing through shredded speakers, the intense, detail-focused micro-percussion of Brian Wilson, even the glitter and fade of the modern ambient noise movement.
Live, the band is a different monster, but like the house we came to band-hood in, full of a punk rock ethos. The songs are extremely loud and are structurally flexible, to allow occasional free-form interpretation. On-stage, instruments and members are strewn haphazardly across the stage or floor, our soulful but cool demeanor the result of long hours of practice, the constant rehearsals even an hour or two before scheduled show-time. Like the 525, we’re a mix of high ideals and punk aesthetic, a blender of precision and chaos, an ear-blistering ball of energy always ready to disintegrate, but retaining enough control to reel in each song.
It wasn’t always that way, and the birth of the band didn’t even take place in the wet, warm womb of the 525, but in Athens, Georgia, where guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Jon (known to everyone but his parents and girlfriend as Crafty) was born. He began writing songs for what would become the band while he worked graveyard shift at a gas station in Indianapolis, where he had moved after high school graduation to pursue love, not music. For the same reason, he soon moved up to Muncie where he started a project with the other three original members, Rob, Dan, and Ben, calling it The Grand Opening. The foursome’s first show took place on an icy January night in 2003 at a local punk rock bar called the Speakeasy. In its infancy, The Grand Opening was showing signs of the psychedelic, multi-media project that it would eventually become. Accompanying the band on the tiny stage was a three-foot tall purple and red, wire and papier-mâché octopus, complete with eight tentacles. Above them was a green banner with decorative trumpets read “The Grand Opening,” and on each side of the stage was a TV/VCR stack playing loops of old cartoons, public service announcements, and 70s-era educational programming.
At the very first show I was immediately drawn in to the artistic production of the band as a whole-in addition to the interesting songwriting, which rarely fell into a verse-chorus-verse format. Being good friends with Ben, and having been acquainted with the rest, I went to many early shows, and when Ben moved to Indianapolis the following fall, I told Rob, “Hey, I’ve seen you guys enough to fill in for Ben at practice.”
This was a lie. I couldn’t play any instruments at the time, and had no more knowledge of notes and scales than I did of nuclear physics. Within a week, I was called to practice. Before leaving my dorm room, I was nervous about being found out as a fake, a phony. I’ll get there and not be able to play a single instrument and they’ll laugh until I walk home, I thought. Crafty didn’t ask me what I knew, however, just began teaching. The first song I learned, “I am Trying to Break Your Neck,” would have been easy for me to play on the glockenspiel with a spine injury. I picked it up quickly, because, honestly, a five-year-old probably could have played “D (pause) - C - B - A” with as much ease. I also played some toy percussion instruments, and began to think that international trade laws were the only thing preventing an untrained monkey from taking my place. The second song, “Bowel Sonata,” only required me to learn three or four chords on the piano, and really, I just memorized the key combinations, marking them with duct tape on the Roland keyboard. After learning this song, Crafty’s girlfriend, Abby, said, “I think Drew should join the band.” I looked up, and the rest of them said, “Yeah, okay.” That was that. I was in.
My first show, the band’s first under the name Everything, Now! (a performer in Chicago threatened legal action for using the name “The Grand Opening”) was in two days. The new name was chosen to reflect our sound, an amalgamation of a thousand influences, and to take a shot at American culture, the bloated material-oriented society we’re surrounded by. I remember little from the first show except that, after the two songs I had learned were over, we decided that I’d sit next to the TV we had on-stage, and pretend like I was watching a movie for the rest of the set, looking bored and pensive. Meanwhile, the rest of the original line-up- Crafty on lead guitar and vocals, Rob on bass, Dan on drums, and Ben on rhythm guitar and bells, played through a solid but tame set.
Shortly after I joined the band, we self-released several hundred copies of our first record, Sunshine of Doom. Complete with psychedelic hand-drawn cover art of a monkey in the lotus position atop a pyramid, its muddy, 8-track lo-fi sound (recorded mostly in the upstairs of the 525) came out in December of 2003. At a show in January 2004 in which the band debuted new material, the owners of Standard Recording Company, a small record label then based out of Kokomo took interest in the band. The show was in a dirty Muncie basement, filled with people who had come out to see if we were as awful as our first review stated, out that week in a Ball State newsmagazine. “This CD isn’t even good enough to level the uneven fourth leg of a rickety table,” the reviewer had said, “It sounds like it was recorded in a funeral parlor at the bottom of a bottomless hole.” Kevin, Evan, and Mark, the three burly, bearded men of Standard Recording, saw us play live quite a few times that winter, apparently loved the “funeral parlor” sound, and by May, we had signed a recording contract and begun work on our second album, which was to be called Police, Police!
Despite a small recording contract, the band remained largely DIY (do-it-yourself), producing almost all of its art, helping out with much of the recording process, booking our own shows and eventually, tours. Inside the band, this is a source of pride, something we can look back on and say, “We did that ourselves, didn’t have to suck up to anybody.” Doing almost everything ourselves helped to keep us independent, which in turn allowed us creative control over anything we were producing artistically. In a way, this is why the band comes off as a collective rather than just a band, as it’s not just the music we’re creating, but packaging, advertising, shirts, books, and various side projects. The attitude is also an outgrowth of our sound, or at least correlates closely to our sonic intentions. We don’t have glossy business cards, expensive t-shirts, an image, or a sound we are trying to fit into. Patches, t-shirts, and early on, CD cases were all hand-made, partially because we’re usually broke, partially because we all believe in the art and energy of the process.
The spring and summer of 2004 was spent recording Police, Police! in the basement of the 525, which was then being used by recording engineer Tyler Watkins as the base of his operations. Police, Police! was a much more fleshed-out sound than its predecessor, as Crafty’s songwriting ethos here was to fit as much as possible onto each song, a la Sgt. Pepper’s or Brian Wilson’s lost album Smile. Some songs on the album were mixed from over 100 separate tracks, including smashing glass, toy marimbas, roomfuls of handclaps, bubbles, found sound samples, remixed classical tunes, and an army of other noises. All of the combinations of sound to produce these rock songs was almost a flexing of creative muscle by Crafty, the lead songwriter, wanting to fit as many separate ideas into a song without it sounding weighed down, or heavy. The record shows this, as the songs are deceptively complex, the multitudes of different noise tracks smoothed over by the sheer catchiness of the songs. The recording process was arduous, dealing with an engineer who loved to tinker, and was in the midst of moving his studio to a different city. Money coming from Standard was also scarce, so convincing Tyler to work for free was an added difficulty. Our sessions often started early in the afternoon and went late into many spring and summer evenings throughout 2004.
Ben’s last shows with the band came after recording finished in August 2004, a sweaty long weekend we spent in Illinois. The first night was at Chicago’s renowned Empty Bottle, where Standard attracted a modest crowd by providing a keg’s worth of free beer. The next night was spent at Nargile’s, a velvet-covered hookah bar in Champaign, and was attended by exactly five people. Two were a couple, a dour looking husband and wife who had played before us, and stood near the soundboard in their khakis looking like laid-off high-school hall monitors. The third was a piss-drunk local, who flitted between stage and bar constantly, the fourth was my older brother, along for the ride, and the fifth was the sound guy, whose real job was playing shitty music during intermissions. We played a loud and brash set, ending with a ten-minute noise freak-out, during which Ben turned off his amp, and Rob threw himself to the ground in a faux-seizure, shattering a pint glass with his jerking foot. Crafty wailed on a saxophone until he couldn’t breathe. Dan stumbled off-stage the moment he stopped playing, completely trashed.
We waited in the parking lot for Dan to stop puking in the bathroom, and for our four dollars from the door. We left the show with only our equipment and a penis gun that Rob bought at a nearby adult bookstore. He kept clapping the pink plastic balls together, shooting the shaft of the gun at Ben’s face. Had Rob known this would be Ben’s last show, I can only imagine he would have done worse. We drove home that night, and I never thought of a failed show like that as paying your dues, the sweat, puke, and fake penises that are required before you start to leave your mark, however temporal, on a music world in Indiana that matters little in the grand picture of light-shows, hair-dos, six-figure recording advances. We were striving towards something we couldn’t know or recognize, that we worried we couldn’t achieve-like the hallway in horror movies or nightmares that keeps extending in front of your eyes, pushing toward a distant door through the thick white walls and light. I realized later that the glamour of a band doesn’t come from playing packed clubs or sold-out art centers, but lies instead in its own energetic output. This energy was cumulative, something you had to build up every night, no matter if there were fifty people or five. That weekend was the start, earmarked by a review the piss-drunk local sent us a few weeks later, a paper he had turned in describing our show as “the best he’d ever seen.” From this moment, we were like traveling evangelists, spreading the word five people at a time, whether in basements, coffeeshops, or living rooms.
I wasn’t okay with it yet.
i'll try to post more about my move and other things as time allows. hope somebody digs this, and let me know what yall think about anything from a single line to a storyline to the whole thing. eventually hope to work to expand this.