It seemed like a big deal to me at the time that I stop referring to my parents’ house as “home.” I never quite understood how my friends, also in their 20s, said they were “going home” for holidays or whatever. Maybe it’s cheeseball, but I felt it important to make a declaration of starting a new home for myself.

This song seemed to just topple right out, for some reason. Using an acoustic guitar, I came up with the chorus first. The lyrics came immediately. Then the verse seemed to write itself — both words and melody.

Originally, the song had a bit of a country swagger to it. But as I formed The Grackles in early 2003, the chord progression was punkified for our first collection of tunes. By 2004, it was recorded for release on our first full-length, “Honeypot.”

In 2007, with The Pawners’ Society, I brought the song back to its acoustic, breezy roots. But this time, it’s harmony-riffic. And there’s no rockin’ guitar solo. And instead of being angry, like the Grackles’ version, it’s a bit more wistful. Which fits the song, too. Maybe it was subconscious and maybe it was an accident, but it makes me happy when a song can grow alongside you.

Steph and I decided that this recording didn’t quite do our live version justice, but we never got around to re-recording it. Nevertheless, we almost always played it live and when Steph and I were hitting a lull during practice, she always seemed to call this one out for a run-through.

DOWNLOAD:
“You Should Hire a Singer” by the Grackles
“You Should Hire a Singer” by the Pawners’ Society

My lady-friend, Cynthia, has a tradition of hosting an “Orphan Thanksgiving” dinner for all her Chicago friends who couldn’t make it to their families’ to celebrate. It’s a big free-for-all. Tons of food. Even more whiskey. And a pie-to-person ratio of 1:1. It’s always loud and fun and filling and ridiculous.

So, seeing as last year was the first that we would both host, since we’d just moved in together, I thought I’d make a musical contribution to the event. (No one wants me cooking them food, trust me…)

So the night before, I came up with a song. Cynthia and I collaborated on the lyrics. (I had to convince her that it’d be funnier to go “cheesily cute” than to go blue. But that’s just our relationship for you…)

In a couple of hours, we’d banged out this tune. (You can tell how quick we did it by how incredibly fake the drums sound. Sue me.) The next day, at Thanksgiving, before everyone ate, we played the song over the stereo. I can’t say that it was a hit. It was roundly ridiculed. I’m pretty sure Cynthia’s friends wanted her to go blue. I’ll give her that: She knows her audience.

So now you can enjoy it and guffaw at its cheesiness.

Happy Thanksgiving.

DOWNLOAD:
“Thanksgiving 2008 Theme” by John and Cynthia

When I asked Brian what we should call the show, he immediately said, “Chicocal Locago?”

So stupid it just might work.

Well, we needed a theme song. I’d written and recorded an instrumental tune that I intended to give to my friend Mike Lust for his band, Tight Phantomz. (I imagined it as a combination of his band with Van Halen — “Tight Halen.”) Well, when I played him the demo I’d recorded (with me playing all the parts…) he politely passed.

Biggest mistake that guy ever made. Except for, you know, kicking himself in the head every night as his signature stage move…

Since the song was just lying around collecting dust, and seemed too bouncy for my band at the time, the Grackles, it became the Chicocal Locago Theme Song. Brian and I (and some heavy reverb) laid down some goofy vocals over the beginning. We left the end instrumental to provide some “bed music” for the intro to our show.

Given that the station’s broadcast radius was roughly the same distance I can spit, I’m going to doubt anyone’s ever heard this.

DOWNLOAD:
“Chicocal Locago Theme Song” by The Grackles

And listening to it again just now, I realized the opening riff is pretty similar to a June of 44 song, “Dexterity of Luck.” It’s not exactly the same, but it’s definitely drinking from the same cup. (June of 44 was a Chicago band that I’m pretty sure broke up before I moved here, but their album “Four Great Points” was a favorite of mine in college. You should listen to it.)

Anyway, “Enemies of Everything” was probably an attempt of mine to incorporate more mindless “oh-oh-oh” sing-along choruses to our repertoire.  It’s funny, my college band The Transoms often had its crowd singing along. The Grackles took a decidedly less poppy, more noisy approach to things. Sing-alongs weren’t our forte. I guess I was trying to bridge that gap with this song.

But, like I said, the band died a few months later and this song existed only as a rough demo on my hard drive. Now it exists as a rough demo on the Internet.

DOWNLOAD:
“Enemies of Everything” by The Grackles/Dark Yellow

But, that being said, I had a hankerin’ to do a quieter, acoustic version of the song “Tame,” from Doolittle. Since it’s just about the most cacophonous song on that record, with all its shrieking and dissonance, I figured it’d be quite a challenge.

I slowed it down, inserted some harmonies in the verse, and tidied things up here and there. But I needed to do something about that crazy, screaming chorus. So I changed it. Whereas the Pixies’ version is about the chaos of yelling, I figured I’d substitute the chaos of multiple melodies. Instead of loud, I just made a mess of things.

And to help with that, I called my next-door neighbor Sarah to do the Kim Deal vocals. A few weeks later, before I’d finished the song, my ex-girlfriend Sara happened to be at my place, so I had her harmonize over the Kim Deal part. Sarah and Sara. Even more chaos. Even more of a mess.

I’m still not a fan of Pixies covers in general, but I do like the way this one came out. I may be slightly biased, however.

DOWNLOAD:
“Tame” by Dark Yellow

He and another guy from Ottumwa, Mike Hoff, were older than me. I considered them pretty “important to the scene,” as it were. So I wrote this sort of light-hearted song about the two of them. The chorus goes, “Ottumwa veterans.” Mike later told me that he thought for years that the chorus was “Driving in a van.” No wonder he always looked at me funny.

This song appeared on Citrus Boy’s second tape, “Not Nirvana.” I remember telling Mike that I’d written it about him and Jake. He was probably slightly embarrassed by it, and asked what I was calling it. I told him I didn’t have a title, and he mentioned that he and Jake once played in a band together.

“Oh yeah? What were you guys called?”

“Spielbox.”

“Can you spell it?”

So there you go, I named it Spielbox, about a band I’d never seen. In fact, the third member of Spielbox, Andy Koettel, still lives in Ottumwa and is still heavily into all aspects of DIY music. He wrote about Spielbox and posted some of their demos on one of his blogs devoted to the Ottumwa music scene in the mid-90s, This is a Tiny Town.

Call me crazy, but I actually still like this song a lot, crappy guitar solo and all. (And since the lyrics are kind of hard to catch, they are: “Mike Hoff and Jake Allee are the subjects of this song/One can do anything, the other just plays drums/Well that’s not true, Jake can record, too/He’s got a four-track in his room”)

DOWNLOAD:
“Spielbox” by Citrus Boy

This being the case, the band Mooncalf should have been awesome.

I was in high school, I’m guessing 16 or 17 years old. My main band was called Citrus Boy. I also played in a punk band called the Smirnoffs. But I jumped at the chance to make music with anyone who would have me. And in Ottumwa, Iowa in the mid-1990s, the undisputed awesome drummer was Jake Allee.

He normally played in a sort of Primus-meets-Minutemen instrumental group called Gristle. They were the “big” local band at the time. So I asked him if he wanted to record some songs. He surprised me by saying, “Sure.”

I gave him a tape of some songs I’d written. He said he learned them. I showed up at his house one Saturday with a guitar and my tape machine. He’d already mic’d his drums. I plugged in and we started knocking the songs out. Generally, we’d play it once to “rehearse,” then hit record and play it again.

Then I went home and added another guitar track and vocals to the cassette, mixed it down and started duplicating them to sell at school. I was pretty excited to be able to play fast songs with the fastest drummer in town. This song is one of my favorites from that session. Like the rest on this tape, it’s just four tracks: drums, two guitars and vocals. One guitar track, panned far left, changes from clean to distorted. The other guitar, panned to the right, does the opposite — changing from distorted to clean. Very forward-thinking and experimental. Or whatever.

I’m pretty sure we played one show, in a sweaty basement party, but the two of us rarely even spoke again. Not because of any hostility or anything. We were just in different friend circles. Yeah, even Ottumwa’s big enough for musicians who are both into punk-inspired music to be outside each other’s sphere.

DOWNLOAD:
“At First” by Mooncalf

I remember coming up with the basics for “Pay the Price” during a Grackles practice. I only had one or two parts by the time I went home that night, but I knew it was something special, so I put in a little more time than I normally would. Soon thereafter, I visited my parents’ house in Iowa for Christmas (2004). My drum set was in the basement, so I always used family visits as a chance to bang out some demos of new songs to give to my bandmates as a way of saying, “This is what I was thinking when I said, ‘Play chicky-chicky-chicky-chicky-boom-boom-chick,’ then YOU go ‘wonka wonka wonka boom boom THWONGGGGG!’”

So, in other words, “Pay the Price” started out life as a crummy demo with me playing drums and experimenting with different vocal patterns. It’s not great or anything, but I still kinda like it. Listen to it here.

After I brought it to my bandmates in the Grackles, we nailed it down and took it into Mike Lust‘s studio in Chicago, Phantom Manor. I’d say it was recorded around April 2005, putting the song at about 6 months old. The pace is quicker, thanks to drummer John Fee, and the background vocals are much more dialed-in, thanks to bass player Brian Aleman. Sadly, this recording was part of a session to record an album that was to be called Feline Strychnine. For one reason or another, even though we mixed the whole thing, it never materialized. Other than a few copies I gave to friends, no one ever heard it. I figure piece by piece it’ll end up on this blog. We’ll start today, with the Grackles’ version of “Pay the Price.”

The Grackles played its last show in September 2007. By that point, I’d started experimenting with my home studio equipment. I was using lots of synthesizers and really overdoing the background vocals. “Pay the Price” seemed like a good song to augment into electro-pop. (I still think the breakdown part sounds like Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, but that might also just be wishful thinking on my part…) Either way, it sounds pretty different than the previous two, don’t you think?

I soon got together with my good friend Stephanie Morris, who had been playing with Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, as well as doing a number of shows as a solo artist. We decided to play mostly quiet, acoustic songs and really highlight vocal harmonies. After we played our first show, we christened ourselves The Pawners’ Society. We had to cull together a longer set pretty quick-like, and “Pay the Price” got drafted. Steph’s voice was so great that anytime I brought out an old song of mine for us to do, I pretty much insisted that she sing it. I made a silent resolution to only sing lead on new originals and the occasional cover. (Even then, I usually tried to talk her into singing covers…)

The problem with “Pay the Price,” however, was the lyrics. I just couldn’t imagine making Steph sing them. The original words were just way too out of character for her.

For example, the verse in the Grackles’ version that went “My throat got torn with salt and brine/We know just where to draw the line/Discharge and soiled bed-sheets/We’ll keep it straight and steady” was changed to “I lost the chance to see the sun/Some things may never be undone/I’ll wait with sinking feelings/Instead I’m left believing.” We recorded the Pawners’ Society version of “Pay the Price” in February 2008 in the studio in my Chicago apartment. You can hear it here.

Most of the other lyrics are the same, but the way Steph sang it, along with the restrained arrangement, brought out a completely new set of emotions. Over a little more than three years, the song went from an angry punk scream-along to a weird, ringtone-ready synthpop song, to an acoustic song that’s both haunting and optimistic at the same time.

–

Here are those download links again:
“Pay the Price” — demo version
“Pay the Price” — The Grackles
“Pay the Price” — Dark Yellow
“Pay the Price” — The Pawners’ Society

The guest vocalist is some anonymous psyochotic who left a lengthy, and possibly drug-induced, voice mail on my work telephone. (I’m a newspaper reporter. It happens quite a lot, actually.) Ranging from classic television to horror movies to marching band instruments, this guy takes the cake for “Weirdest Way To Start a Workday.” But after coming in groggy-eyed to work one morning and hearing this gem of a voice-mail first-thing, I knew I had to do something interesting with it.

That was probably October 2006? I recorded it and filed it away on my computer.

Fast forward to about a year ago. I was tinkering in my little home studio and decided to make the aforementioned noise song. I recorded a heavily distorted, plodding bassline. Then I put together some midi-drums and EQ’d them ridiculously low and, of course, distorted. Who needs a guitar part? I just recorded a few minutes of feedback, then cut it up and spliced it back together in a half-random, half-melodic kind of way.

For some reason, the memory of Mr. Telephone Message came rushing back at me. With only two edits — no joke — just to split it into three sections. It fit the recording perfectly. It was meant to be.

Now, keep in mind, this thing has never had the magic wand of a mastering engineer passed over it, so it’s pretty murky sounding. But until now, maybe four people have heard it. It won’t change the world, but it makes me smile every time.

DOWNLOAD:
“Sissy and the Stooges” by Dark Yellow

LYRICS:

A snow cone or a slurpee?
Things aren’t what they always seem.
John Travolta — a dressing down by Sissy Spacek?
Or a French horn, aka flugel?

The International Ampitheatre and Livestock Exhibition
Larry crashes through the wall with a farm truck
and loudspeakers
Playing “Three Blind Mice”
And Curly KO’s everyone in the ring!

Sarah and I were neighbors at the time. That summer, she’d often come over unannounced, ring my doorbell and run away. Or she’d come in and drink my whiskey and soak up my air conditioning. Other times, we’d write songs and record them. When I asked her if we had a name for our impromptu musical collaboration, she said, “The Horse You Rode In On.” Sure, why not? So when her roommate Johnathan Crawford’s birthday came up, she decided to give him the gift of music. She wrote some lyrics, I made up some chord changes and then we hooked up the microphones and recorded it.

There’s no doubt about it. It’s terrible. But it was a fun summer. And thank goodness Sarah is a better magazine editor and party organizer than she is lead singer.

DOWNLOAD:
“Crawfordshire” by The Horse You Rode In On